what you have there is most likely a lump of refined silicon
Yeah, just my bad for not checking the English name for it properly, here we use
Silisium for the stuff, while we use
silikon for breast implants etc.. hence the confusion on my end.
I'm jealous! All you have to do is sputter on some boron and phosphorus and demonstrate making your own transistor -- Fundamentals Friday demonstration?
I got more of the stuff
But I was hoping that Dave would do something like that.
The piece of silicon you have looks like a sawed then broken piece of a crystal used for wafers, not a mineral rock. The surfaces are sawed (by appearance). A standard wafer would be sawed much thinner. The shiny appearance of the sides are the look of single crystal silicon.
The piece was from a large slab of silicon that measured approx 10x10x30cm (or thereabouts), and got cut by a diamond saw into very thin wafers, which was then sent somewhere in Asia for further processing. These then ended up as the cells you see in your regular solar panels. This part is the bottom, hence the "rough" surface on one side, and also has the worst quality in the batch. If I remember right the top side was
>99.9% Si and the bottom was
>98% Si, so you would get varying grades of wafers throughout the slab.
The letter was meant for next weeks mailbag (episode 666), forgot to write that on the front