How to Make Silicon

To make a piece of silicon pure enough to power an iPhone. You must make sure that when silicon is melted down from its natural blocks and formed into a cylinder, chips can be sliced from the thing that's holding the melted silicon doesn't contaminate it. Silicon melts at 1300 degrees Celsius. 2400°F. It’s very hot. Just about anything that comes into contact with the pool of molten silicon will, at minimum, shed off little pieces of itself that mix with the melt.

Each rod of pure silicon comes out of one of these, a crucible made entirely out of quartz that comes from Spruce Pine, the quartz that comes from Spruce Pine, and only the quartz from Spruce Pine must be used for every single one of these crucibles, because some of it will inevitably end up in the molten silicon. Boeing planes, iPhones, PlayStations, MRI machines they all require at least one advanced chip that's been cut out of a silicon rod formed in a crucible made with quartz from Spruce Pine.

This crucible is just 99.9% pure quartz, but just three inches wide were melting tin. I don't have the equipment, skills, or insurance, so attempt Silicon. Crucibles used to make silicon stand 3 to 5ft tall. They're 2 to 3ft across and can only be used one time. For every 1 million iPhones Apple sells, a crucible will be built, filled up with molten silicon and destroyed by the process. Each chip in them starts out as silicon blocks that are melted inside the crucible, created using a process so difficult to perfect, it's not considered science, but black art, because you can't just let the molten silicon cool and pull it out, can't pour it into something else for fear of contamination.

A Polish engineer named Czochralski discovered using melted tin just like this, that discovered using melted tin just like this, that if you dipped an object into the metal, pulled it out in just the right way, you could grow a metal cylinder, an atomically perfect metal cylinder that, in the case of silicon, can be sliced into circular disks half a millimeter thick. A tiny, perfectly structured seed crystals melted on the tip of a metal rod and then dipped down until it just touches the surface of the molten silicon.

Pulled up at an excruciatingly slow pace. The rod rotates, the molten silicon clings to the seed, and as it cools, because it's touching the perfect seed crystal arranges its atoms in that exact same perfect pattern performed by people known as master growers. How fast to spin and pull, how to manage the temperature, the gases surrounding it, everything that allows a perfect silicon ingot to be grown is not considered a true science.

There is no manual, just a feel. Learn through decades of apprenticeship to masters of the craft. Can't patent it because you'd have to reveal how to do it. The operators rely on sound, smell, or color. Even the masters fail 20 to 30% of the time despite perfect settings. These are the traits of a black art, like how to make the blades inside every jet engine grown from a single nickle crystal into one giant crystal molecule by molecule, using what's called the pigtail selector is known to a select few at GE, Pratt and Whitney and Rolls-Royce, or the handful of people at Cannon And Leica who know how to polish the highest end lenses used in cinematic cameras or semiconductor equipment.

The Takumi technique. Nobody has cracked the alchemy of 1623. That's let Zildjian for 400 years make the world's best symbols, using ingredients that every metallurgist will tell you should produce metal so brittle it shatters when struck by a drumstick. 80% copper, 20% tin with traces of silver. The process is only known by the CEO, delegating it out in parts to prevent anyone from knowing the whole secret.