• theneverfox@pawb.social
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    3 days ago

    Silicon is, but silicon is like a little layer in between copper, lead, gold, maybe indium or something.

    It’s semiconductive, meaning it is conductive depending on how you run current through it… But that’s just one part of the gate. You have millions of gates all connected in sigils…

    By far, the biggest use of silicon in any computer is the fiberglass board, which does nothing… You could make it out of wood, or just not use one and connect all the components with rigid wires and have a really cool but fragile lack of board

    Edit: had a brain fart on the word dielectric

    • swag_money@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      It’s dielectric, meaning it is conductive depending on how you run current through it

      silicon is a semiconductor! dielectric is just a fancy term for an electrical insulator.

      :.dielectric grease is NOT CONDUCTIVE.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        3 days ago

        Yeah, I was thinking of the other materials used in computers and had a brain fart. Although I think dielectric insulators also let ions through, otherwise it’d just be an insulator

        • swag_money@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          so to my understanding the ideal dielectric is a perfect insulator. dielectrics however have some free electrons and the ability to become polarized in the presence of an electric field. this has the benefit of increasing the charge carrying surface area in something like a capacitor. so i think dielectrics are a subset of insulators and by definition do not pass current/free electrons.

    • Beartotem@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      You literally have no clue what you’re talking about, do you?

      Dielectric is synonymous to insulator. Silicon is a semi-conductor.

      Silicon is literally what makes most transistor a transistor. And transistor are what make modern logic circuit perform logic operations. The metal parts are just for passively transporting electrical charges between the active parts. (There are other semi-conductor which would work perfectly fine for that purpose, but silicon is more common.)

      The fiberglass board is not silicon, it’s fiberglass… glass is silicon oxide, but that’s mostly a coincidence.

      A mosfet, the type of transistor most often used in logic circuits, is made of silicon, with various doping elements, covered by an oxide layer on top of which lays a metalic gate. The oxide layer is an insulator that only serves to prevent current from flowing from the gate into the silicon beneath. The presence of charge on the gate changes the electrical property of the sillicon beneath the oxide, switching it from from insulator to conductor depending on the inscribed dopant pattern.

      I guess the best way to get to the truth on the internet is still to spew around bullshit, to get someone who knows irritated enough to write something. But geez… that’s all fairly well explained on wikipedia

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        3 days ago

        Aside from using dielectric wrong (I still can’t remember what the term i was going for is) everything else I said is correct.

        What is a MOSFET by weight and volume? Conductive metal. There’s a tiny bit of silicon in each gate, surrounded be metal sinks

        • Beartotem@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          No, just about everything you said is wrong. Again, a mosfet is mostly silicon.

          If you’d just bother looking at the diagram of a field effect transistor you’d realize immediatly how ridiculous that affirmation of yours is.

          But there’s no point talking to you any further, that is quite clear. Not that I ever thought there was much chance. Anyway, my previous comment wasn’t for you, but for everyone else.