Small grains of silicon because it has been crushed. This is not the silicon used incomputers.A thin cut of a largecrystal of silicon that is very smooth. This is the type of silicon can be used in computers because it is verypure.
Silicon looks like ametal, but cannot do everything that a metal can, like conductelectricity well. Silicon is used a lot in today'scomputers and nearly every other electronic device as well.Germanium can also be used in computers, but silicon is much easier to find.
For example, all of the sand found at the beach is made of small cubes of silicon dioxide also known assilica.Glass is made by heatingsand hot enough until it melts.[11] Glass made from silicon can be made in different colours by adding colouring compounds. Many rocks and minerals are composed of compounds of silicon andoxygen calledsilicates.
Silicon is asemiconductor, and much used incomputers. A typical desktop computer contains several dozenintegrated circuits made mostly of silicon. A super-pureisotope of silicon, silicon-28, can now be made 40 times more pure than before. It is very important for the next big development in computers. This stores "qubits" inatoms of anotherelement, likephosphorous, embedded in a tiny layer of ultra-pure silicon-28. These qubits cansimultaneously encode a one and a zero, for incredibly fast and complex calculations.[12]
↑Weeks, Mary Elvira (1932). "The discovery of the elements: XII. Other elements isolated with the aid of potassium and sodium: beryllium, boron, silicon, and aluminum".Journal of Chemical Education.9 (8):1386–1412.Bibcode:1932JChEd...9.1386W.doi:10.1021/ed009p1386.
↑Voronkov, M. G. (2007). "Silicon era".Russian Journal of Applied Chemistry.80 (12): 2190.doi:10.1134/S1070427207120397.
