I do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.
I used to graduate at an institute having physicists as well as chemists, I gues it was no coincidence that only physicists operated with HF, one chemist told me that no chemist in their right mind would touch it
HF is routinely used in analytical labs; it's standard to microwave HF solutions for ICP digestions. It's not even the most hazardous reagent in my lab right now.
Now, perhaps this chemist meant that no chemist in their right mind would physically touch HF--in that case, I agree completely!
That's not quite accurate (but close enough). We had HF in the chem lab. It lived in a dedicated metal box with a massive neon warning label and a padlock.
It's notable in comparison that all the deadly organics lived together in an unlocked cupboard (vented OFC). I think the only thing I ever saw treated as more of a pariah than HF were radioactive isotopes. Those generally get an entire dedicated room with restricted entry and a tedious mandatory cleaning procedure.
Makes sense. HF deserves the same awe as radioactive material. I've always found both fascinating. Like some kind of dark magic that curses you if you contact it.
I keep thinking that for home tinkering this is really the wrong approach. Surely there are other more DIY-friendly ways to make switches besides with semiconductors? Sure, they wouldn't achieve anywhere near the same density as SOTA semiconductors, but that's not really possible at home anyway.
Oh, my dream clean room is of course fully robot automated and I can watch through a big (safety) window.
Knowing that really helps you understand just how valuable semiconductors are as a product.
In my journey to make pcb’s at home I decided to stop once I almost gassed myself and shifted instead to buying gpus
I visited a pcb making factory once. Left with an appreciation for the amount of work needed for 80-layer pcbs, and knowing I would not want to deal with making them myself.
Honest question, is there a way to run the entire process acid-free?
No acids at all? That would be stupendously difficult for no real benefit. So many things are acids, so many useful reactions involve acids, and there's not a significant correlation between "is an acid" and "danger".
yes acids capable of etching = danger :) aktschually
No. Silicon oxide (glass) is extremely tough from a chemical perspective. That's why it's used in chemistry for everything. Barely anything touches it. Also this is the main reason I think that the meme of "silicon based life" is completely absurd and comes from people who only took high school chemistry and built their worldview on that.
Is it conceivable that some organic solvent could be synthesized that is, simultaneously harmless to water-based biological life, and capable of etching Silicon oxides?
Not really. Organics don't really have any affinity for this type of compound. You could, of course, create some kind of organic fluorinating compound, but it would basically just put you back at square one for safety.
This is the issue I have with people saying that solar power is "clean and eco friendly".
It sure is, if you ignore the fact that you have to have a factory to make it where one of the *nicest* things around is the fucking hydrofluoric acid, and most of the rest will kill you instantly in trace amounts.
The technology is, the production is not but you can contain that, at least in theory. Compare that with gasoline that everytime you obtain energy from it you burn it out of existence and create a mess of the environment.
This is why we should have converted all the cars to run on propane, instead of scrapping them in favour of "cleaner greener diesels" 20 years ago when they started all the "scrappage scheme" bollocks.
The propane is going to get burnt anyway. May as well extract some useful work from it, and when you run a car off it they become ultra low emission.
It is only half as bad as working in the places that make tbose chemicals for use in clean rooms. Swaping out "empty" phosphine tanks is bad, but filling and shipping hundreds of full tanks is worse.