Chip Fab Water Conservation, Recycling & Rain Capture Inputs

Water pollution, arid environments, lack of rain water capture, agricultural water use, water used in CHIP fabs & ultra pure water & water recycling

Human body about 70% water by mass & drinking relatively clean water to stay well hydrated as a person crucial to preserve kidney function & brain function. Being well hydrated by getting 40-140 oz of water per day, depending on age & activity levels & ambient temperatures & weather, dry vs humid, sweating hard working vs sedentary, young & super active vs older & less active. 

Water is amazing, a mixture of hydrogen & oxygen gasses that turns into a liquid with very high specific heat capacity, able to form ice in its solid form thats less dense than liquid water, which is why ice floats on water. With a neutral PH in its pure form, water the eco-friendly natural safe solvent- amazing H2O! 

Chip Fab Water Use Enormous, like Oil Refining 

Did you know that making chips for electronics one of the largest consumers of water, just behind oil refining where water used to clean & remove sulfur from oil & to clean up the oil for better quality of the lighter high value petrochemical feedstocks coming out of the top of the distillation column, where chemicals like ethylene are converted to high performance plastics like PE or polyethylene, a strong food safe plastic used in wide range of applications. Chip fabs use water to clean the wafers between processing steps. 

Ultra Pure Water Rinses Between Chip Stages

Chip fabs utilize ultra pure water which is complicated & expensive to make from natural water, to clean between chemical processing stages during the more than 100 steps required to convert a silicon wafer into an integrated circuit. Acid etching, followed by UPW rinsing. Metal ion deposit, followed by water rinsing. Much of the ultra pure water contaminated by pollutants with these rinsing steps. Complex water cleaning & recycling & purification methods utilized to clean up waste water before returning the water to nature or back to the processes as clean up UPW again in a closed loop thats more sustainable! 

Water Conserving Technology & Recycling Water in Closed Loops

New efforts aimed at creating a closed loop for water use at the high value added ChipFab manufactures, techniques that mix microwave, laser & ultrasonics with less water for the rinse steps to reduce water consumption in the processing streams & reduce volume of waste water recycling expensive processing to remove pollutants for reuse or discharge into nature. 

Capturing & Purifying Rain Water

The solar cycle on Earth puts water into Earth's atmosphere thankfully. Changes in weather & pressure drops cause precipitation or rain to fall back onto Earth's landscapes & oceans & rivers & lakes & streams & mountains often as snow or frozen water. Distilled by the atmosphere, rain contaminated by pollen & mold & mildew & fecal particles & dust from rocks & soil on the way back to earth, so captured rain water has to be cleaned up with filtering & other processing stages to become tap water & further purified for use as UPW or ultra pure water in a chip fab like those owned by Intel or TSMC. Take a look at the processing stages to make UWP for chip fabs. 

Making UPW for ChipFab

Amazing Chip Fabs

Integrated circuit manufacturing involves over a hundred stages of foundry processing steps, chemical etching & clean rinsing the wafers. Wafers start out as a huge heavy super pure silicon rod extracted from a rotating high temp ceramic furnace. A crystal suspended on a tungsten wire dipped carefully into a molten bath of silicon covered by a layer of argon gas. The seed crystal slowly rotated & pulled out of an orifice at the top of the furnace as atoms of silicon form a big monolithic crystal expanding down & away from the seed crystal. Some of these giant single crystal silicon rods weight 1000lbs & hang from a silicon wire only 1mm in diameter, as silicon extremely strong under tension. 

Silicon Lithium Ion Batteries 

Silicon nano-wire materials for anode materials in advanced lithium ion batteries exploit this strength of silicon to resist expansion & contraction happening during charge & discharge cycles, shrinking & swelling physical damage that cracks hard carbon the more common anode material, over many hundreds of cycles or about 3 years of daily use.