I had this questions come into my head becasue I was watching a video of someone zooming into a microchip and they pass a human hair and continue zooming in an incredible amount. I’ve heard that some of the components in microchips are the size of DNA strands which is mind boggling. I also watched a video of the world’s smoothest object in which they stated that normal objects are no where near as smooth because if you blew them up in size the imperfections would be the size of Mount Everest. Like if you blew a baseball blew up to the size of earth it would have huge valleys and mountains. It wouldn’t be perfectly smooth across. So my question is how are these chip components the size of DNA not affected by these imperfections. Wouldn’t transistors not lay flat on the metal chip? How are they able to make the chips so smooth? No way it’s a machine press that flattens the metal out that smooth right? Or am I talking about two different points and we haven’t gotten that small yet?
In: Engineering
Chips are made in ultra-clean facilities, and they still have a defect rate high enough to serve as the input into other industries, such as photovoltaics.
Monocrystalline solar cells are often made of chip wafers which have too high of a defect rate to be worth slicing up into individual chips. They abrade off all of the chip etchings, and convert the recycled wafer into a high efficiency photovoltaic unit. PV materials don’t need the ultra high purity monocrystalline silicon used in chip manufacturing to work, though the monocrystalline silicon has substantially higher performance than polysilicon PV material. However, it is not cost effective to make such ultra purity silicon for photovoltaics, so they take the rejects from the chip industry, which are more than good enough for PV use, and recycle them as PV materials. This is a win-win arrangement. The chip makers don’t end up wasting high purity silicon, and the PV makers don’t have to grow monocrystalline silicon from scratch.
# Wafer World | [The Rise of Silicon Wafer Recycling in Semiconductor Manufacturing ](https://www.waferworld.com/post/the-rise-of-silicon-wafer-recycling-in-semiconductor-manufacturing)
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