It costs billions of dollars

...to build a super duper, ultra clean, semiconductor fabrication plant that can produce one of these silicon wafers.

My work friend Clix - that will be Dr. Clix to you and me and a very clever engineer scientist - was visiting our Silicon Valley HQ a few weeks back. I pestered him and he had to go speak to some uber-clever engineers to get hold of 3 of these. He hand carried them back, as you would, a cake tin. Yes these babies can shatter, because they are like glass. They are of course a visual treat because of how beautifully they diffract light. It is also possible to not notice one if it was staring you in the face, depending on the light conditions. Needless to say, each one of these is very expensive, worth thousands of dollars in finished product.

See the complete wafer
...and another angle

Dr. Clix was disappointed that I hadn't blipped this yesterday. Because I had brought the wafers home for the weekend for exactly that. See his comment yesterday. :)) What he didn't know when he shook his head this morning at me, was that I had already shot these after midnight. So technically, today. No post-processing - straight off the camera.

You've seen these treats in an earlier blip. Today's blip features what goes inside those little treats. For the uninitiated ...please take a look at your memory card ...yes the one that is inside your camera. It contains the little fellers from my earlier blip. Those little fellers have one or more of these rectangular bits inside them.

Each of these 300 millimeter wafers (about a foot in diameter) will be precision cut into individual bits that make up - what is essentially - digital film, and pretty much most other memory that goes into your phones, cameras and everything electronics. Technically this is NAND flash memory. OK, so it is only part of a digital film, the storage part. The other part of the digital film is the sensor ...but there is only so much I can describe here without displaying my ignorance, misleading you, or both. :))

Signing off now. Lovely comments, stars and heart for yesterday. I foresee slightly diminished blipping over the next weeks. But I will come around to see yours and catch up with comments. Bye for now, my friends :))