Researched
Ultrapure Silicon & Chips
Sand becomes ultrapure silicon (99.9999999%): the materials chemistry behind the transistor and the chip.
Open in the interactive tree →The first transistor material was germanium (1947), and Texas Instruments built the first silicon transistor in 1954. The Czochralski method (1916) pulls single crystals, and zone refining (Pfann, 1952) cleans them to less than one foreign atom per billion. Microelectronics is impossible without this chemistry; gallium nitride and silicon carbide have since joined silicon.
Prerequisites
Unlocks
- Photovoltaics1954The first practical solar cell (Bell Labs, 1954) used ultrapure doped silicon
- Integrated Circuit1958-1959Noyce's planar chip needed ultrapure silicon
- MOSFET and CMOS chips1959
- Planar Process1959
- Hubble Space Telescope1990Hubble's cameras use silicon CCD detectors
- Graphene & 2D Materials2004
- Perovskite-Silicon Tandem Cells2025