hombre

I am not so pessimistic. I exaggerate when I say 'a bucket of dirt and sand' going in to one end. It's true that such a machine would be mass-rejecting all kinds of stuff that would want to crust all over the interior; but even that can be minimized by starting with pure-ish substances and making it target 'junk spots' to accumulate the garbage (assuming a time-of-flight approach). Aside from a filament (possibly) in the ionizer, the thing would be a bunch of dead-end electrodes and almost no moving parts. The rest is electronics that it can stockpile. What's to break?

Oi! You took away the link to my ad-less, profitless, inoffensive little board. No, the machine does not make sense in a capitalist system. It's purpose is to provide devices and reactants for electronics, automation and pharmaceuticals in a zero-growth, non-polluting society. There is no other way to make such things without mining and pollution. Afaik. The cost of the machine doesn't matter, only the labor required to keep it running matters. It has to be low-maintenance and made of fairly simple materials. No rhenium. No molybdenum. I'm open to suggestions. We can purify the Si by the old method of crystallization, that at least should simplify the job quite a bit.

If anyone wants to pursue this further, please post here [link removed by moderator]. Thanks!

Just a functioning semiconductor made by any means. A processor, say, or a power transistor. Imagine a machine that you could dump a bucket of dirt and sand into and get finished semiconductors out the other end.

Thanks, but what I'm looking for is more like this: Ion beam deposition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Also known as 'soft landing' deposition. To make semiconductors, we need to make micron-sized features.

How do they do that?

The efficiency wouldn't be great, but efficiency isn't the goal.

I'm wondering if it's possible to make LEDs, displays and semiconductors using a big ion deposition machine. The machine would be like a very slow and doubtless huge 'replicator' that can manufacture a wide variety of things by spray-painting atoms onto a substrate. Ideally the device would also dissociate and purify the silicon, metals and other substances as they are used, like a mass spectrometer; it would not have to be frequently dismantled for cleaning or maintenance (unlike a mass spectrometer); and it would not contain anything extraordinarily rare or costly. If anyone takes an interest, how big would such a machine have to be for a yield of, say, a gram of product per day? What would the basic design look like? Right... I'll get it started myself by calculating the obvious. Lets assume that what we're making is mostly silicon. One gram of Si is 2.7 x10^22 atoms. That's 4.4kC (4400 'coulombs') of Si per day (assuming the atom stream is of silicon atoms with one extra or one missing electron); which comes to just 50ma. That's a lot for an ion gun. It's a lot even for 100 ion guns. Using many guns in parallel confuses things a bit. Maybe one biggun?