Word: silicones
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Photovoltaic cells made of silicon or cadmium sulfide, which can convert sunlight directly into electricity. Costs are very high, and existing installations are still only experimental...
Back in the ovens, the wafers are baked again in an atmosphere of gases loaded with "dopants." Like oil stains in a concrete driveway, these impurities soak into the underlying silicon. Since chips usually contain as many as ten layers, all these steps-"rusting," photomasking, etching, baking, etc.-must be repeated for each layer. Then the entire wafer is coated with an aluminum conductor, which also must be masked, etched and bathed in acid. Finally, an eagle-eyed computerized probe scans the wafer for defective circuitry and marks the bad chips in red. The wafer is then separated...
...followed one another in rapid succession, and the fifth generation, built out of such esoteric devices as bubble memories and Josephson junctions, will be on the market in the 1980s. In the 1990s, when the sixth generation appears, the compactness and reasoning power of an intelligence built out of silicon will begin to match that of the human brain...
...surpassed those of his predecessor, Homo erectus. Only a carbon-chemistry chauvinist would assume that the new species must be man's flesh-and-blood descendants, with brains housed in fragile shells of bone. The new kind of intelligent life is more likely to be made of silicon...
...neighbors know we are here, and their replies should be on the way. In another 15 or 20 years we will receive their message and meet our future. Let us be neither surprised nor disappointed if its form is that of Artoo Detoo, the bright, personable canister packed with silicon chips...