this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Silicon is extremely common. I wouldn't call it a rare rock.
Silicon is, but silicon is like a little layer in between copper, lead, gold, maybe indium or something.
It's semiconductive, meaning it is conductive depending on how you run current through it... But that's just one part of the gate. You have millions of gates all connected in sigils...
By far, the biggest use of silicon in any computer is the fiberglass board, which does nothing... You could make it out of wood, or just not use one and connect all the components with rigid wires and have a really cool but fragile ~~lack of~~ board
Edit: had a brain fart on the word dielectric
You literally have no clue what you're talking about, do you?
Dielectric is synonymous to insulator. Silicon is a semi-conductor.
Silicon is literally what makes most transistor a transistor. And transistor are what make modern logic circuit perform logic operations. The metal parts are just for passively transporting electrical charges between the active parts. (There are other semi-conductor which would work perfectly fine for that purpose, but silicon is more common.)
The fiberglass board is not silicon, it's fiberglass.... glass is silicon oxide, but that's mostly a coincidence.
A mosfet, the type of transistor most often used in logic circuits, is made of silicon, with various doping elements, covered by an oxide layer on top of which lays a metalic gate. The oxide layer is an insulator that only serves to prevent current from flowing from the gate into the silicon beneath. The presence of charge on the gate changes the electrical property of the sillicon beneath the oxide, switching it from from insulator to conductor depending on the inscribed dopant pattern.
I guess the best way to get to the truth on the internet is still to spew around bullshit, to get someone who knows irritated enough to write something. But geez.. that's all fairly well explained on wikipedia
Aside from using dielectric wrong (I still can't remember what the term i was going for is) everything else I said is correct.
What is a MOSFET by weight and volume? Conductive metal. There's a tiny bit of silicon in each gate, surrounded be metal sinks
No, just about everything you said is wrong. Again, a mosfet is mostly silicon.
If you'd just bother looking at the diagram of a field effect transistor you'd realize immediatly how ridiculous that affirmation of yours is.
But there's no point talking to you any further, that is quite clear. Not that I ever thought there was much chance. Anyway, my previous comment wasn't for you, but for everyone else.
silicon is a semiconductor! dielectric is just a fancy term for an electrical insulator.
:.dielectric grease is NOT CONDUCTIVE.
Yeah, I was thinking of the other materials used in computers and had a brain fart. Although I think dielectric insulators also let ions through, otherwise it'd just be an insulator
so to my understanding the ideal dielectric is a perfect insulator. dielectrics however have some free electrons and the ability to become polarized in the presence of an electric field. this has the benefit of increasing the charge carrying surface area in something like a capacitor.
so i think dielectrics are a subset of insulators and by definition do not pass current/free electrons.
I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect insulator (at least nothing we can build with)
It definitely resists the movement of free elections through... But think a capacitor let's ions flow, grease is a sort of fluid...
So I'm thinking it must be a material that let's atoms move around to some degree, but resists the transfer of electrons
I'm well aware that nothing is perfect. i was talking about definitions :p
the two terminals of a capacitor are insulated from eachother but they can pass alternating current via capacitive coupling. I'm not sure what you mean about flowing ions in grease. do you mean electrolyte? like in a battery?
you're describing electrical resistance :p
Okay, so like ac in a capacitor smooths current, right? As opposed to DC, where it stores energy?
Imagine a positive and negative terminal with goo in the middle. Atoms move around it randomly in diffusion, but charged atoms are pulled left then right in oscillation. On average, they'd be in the middle
Those ions impart positive charge to the side they're on, so if your cycle is off in one direction or the other, they'd be pushed to the opposite conductor - smoothing the current
I'm not just talking about an insulator - I'm talking about an insulator fluid enough for ions to travel through based on the charges of the...I forget the word in this context, it's anode or cathode
Like rubber? Great insulator, but it's solid - you can't make a capacitor out of it (or a gate, but that's more about heat conductivity). So dielectric insulators must be fluid to some degree, right?
Not in the purity needed to make semiconductors.
It's refined. It isn't found like that.
Silicon is not a rock so saying that silica is not rare is irrelevant to the "rare rock" line.
Silica is indeed refined but the rocks that they refine to get the pure silica are indeed rare rocks. They only really refine the pure silicate that already start with super low impurities. relatively speaking. And the low trace elements impurities is what makes them rare.
Jesus Christ, Marie, they're minerals!
Thank you for the information. This meme always bothered me, so glad to have the info.