IBM has found a new process whereby they can clean and reuse silicon that would otherwise be thrown away. I believe that they’re the first company to have a process to salvage the imperfect wafers. Silicon is becoming a scarce commodity as a burgeoning solar power industry is greedily creating scarcity as they ramp up to meet ever increasing demand.

Per PC World:

The new process cleans the silicon pieces with water and an abrasive pad leaving them in better condition for reuse. The entire process to clean an 8-inch wafer is about one minute. Eric White, the inventor of the process, said that IBM can now get five or six monitor wafers out of one that would have been crushed and discarded. The cleaned wafers can also be sold to the solar-cell industry, which has a high demand for the silicon material to use in solar panels. White said that shortage would need to be “extreme” to use the wafers in consumer electronics and that IBM does not plan to do so.

The IBM site in Burlington, Vermont, has been using the process and reported an annual savings in 2006 of more than US$500,000 dollars. Expansion of the new technique has begun at IBM’s site in East Fishkill, New York, and 2007 savings estimates are more than $1.5 million. The Vermont and New York plants are IBM’s only semiconductor manufacturing sites.

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