>>14146244Currently integrated circuit fabs have a failure rate when they make integrated circuits. Some of that is due to errors in the crystal. (This is why graphics cards and cpus have different tiers, an error free one is the best tier 1080gtx, a few errors is mid tier 1070gtx, etc). The size you can make your crystal matters because some parts of the photolithography happen all at once on a per slice basis (not on the surface area-basis), and if the slice of crystal you’re working on is a disc of 300mm diameter, you have you have roughly a pizza size to work on. If your crystal is 1000mm, your surface is roughly 11 pizzas worth. So doing part of semiconductor fab in space you might be able to make lower error chips (thus more high-tier yield) at a lower cost.
In case you hadn’t noticed, chips are in everything and the demand for faster/better/cheaper chips seems to be growing, not shrinking.
And for big sapphires, same thing. Potentially by doing some stuff in space you can make the crystals bigger/purer so instead of just Corning gorilla glass on your phone you could have literally sapphire (9 on mohs scale for hardness, diamond is 10). And because you might be able to grow extremely large and pure crystals in space there could be extremely thin and strong windows, phones, TVs, and monitors with sapphire too. The materials are cheap as dirt (aluminum and oxygen) so once manufacturing is figured out they’d go in basically every device.
