UK - the only country to achieve to-orbit capability only to shelve it after the first flight.
UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#22> "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, c…
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.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#23I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you woul…
>this is not manufacturing chips in space
*crisps
It's from the UK.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#24Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#254000 times purer seems a questionable claim to me. 4000 times purer then what? Current Earthbound state of the art? A guy in shed with a vacuum pump and a heater? On what axis: crystal defects or contamination? High vacuums aren't at all impossible on Earth and silicon boules are already single crystals. What exactly about their process permits such a huge quality improvement?
Earth's surface isn't a microgravity environment. The principle that you can get purer crystalline structures with less interference from the earth's gravitational pull has explored on space stations since the 1970s; that aspect and potential applications in higher performing semiconductors and drugs are fairly well understood
What hasn't been solved yet and Space Forge (and Varda et al for biotech) are hoping to solve are the unit economics of reentry vehicles to actually make it viable for manufacturing.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#26I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you woul…
Note that growing ingots is an incredible feat at that purity and size that they achieve on earth. It’s already a very very hard step in a crazy process for entire chip manufacturing.
Leaving aside the small issue of getting there, wouldn't it be easier to achieve in space given there is fewer impurities like air floating around?
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like a vacuum flask, I imagine. Vacuum is a very good insulator already and you minimise radiative heat transfer (infrared glow) by making a surface shiny and metallic usually (low emissivity)
If you have to bring your own vacuum flask, don't you lose half the benefit of doing it in space?
I imagine you just need the flask part, the vacuum is rather easy in space.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have to bring your own vacuum flask, don't you lose half the benefit of doing it in space?
Isn't the primary benefit the lack of gravity?
You can reduce metals through vacuum pyrolysis at much lower temperatures without a reducing agent if you have a vacuum. This could make industrial scale processing of steel relatively easy on the moon.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#29> "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, c…
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.
No way. This is being done because there’s a predictable path to profitability. It’s not just random shot in the dark science you can sometimes see in academia. It’s just this path isn’t clear to us laymen… I know because launching into space isn’t something that will be done just for science
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#30I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you woul…
Do gravity-based defects outweigh displacement defects from fast particles?
Also, there are large headwinds from having to ship up a large quantity of raw material and have to deorbit a payload so fragile that any amount of shock is unacceptable. Maybe a high purity silicon boule pays for these headwinds with room for profit on top. I'm skeptical, but time will tell.