alt Hacker News> "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge.
> "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes."
Okay, but, we have 5G towers, car chargers, and planes right now?
I understand that purer material is better, but to what extent are the impurities of current wafer production methods limiting us? Why is shooting the furnace into space the best option? Why is making wafers 4+ orders of magnitude more expensive the solution we should go for?
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There is no reason to do it with current processes. It could possibly reduce defect rate/increase yields but I'm not sure impurities are even leading cause now.
But we might discover other uses, that's what science is.
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Come on, it’s the BBC - which has a much wider spectrum of audience than you and me.
Think with it a little - the statement “in the 5G tower” is intended to bring the context of this event closer to those who are not knowledgeable about this technology, but would nevertheless read the article. You and I may understand that the economies of scale don’t make sense yet - but they could, some day, if this technology succeeds, be relevant to the local neighborhood.
To many, the 5G tower is the most mystical, mysterious technology in their neighborhood - and indeed, the silicon ingots being manufactured this way would, eventually, find their way to the local neighborhood if this technology is successful.
It would probably have been more appropriate to say “some day these ingots will power the supercomputers in your pocket”, which would be an accurate statement - but that is a whole order of magnitude of different economic scale than in the industrialization of cell networks. Maybe it’d be more appropriate for the BBC writer to have said that satellites might one day benefit from space-grown silicon wafers - but that is still to distant to the Mom and Pop readership they’re targeting in these articles…