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- Embed this notice@deprecated_ii @Marakus >it's harder to get high purity silicon from beach sand
As far as I can tell, semiconductor grade silicon is almost never made from beach sand due to the extra expenses in having to purify such a low quality feedstock, but use cases that tolerate 96% purity silicon work fine with beach sand.
From what I can tell, typically quartzite is carbothermically reacted with highly pure coke to leave 99% pure silicon and then there's multi-step purification processes that include conversion to silicon tetrachloride or trichlorosilane and purification to like 99.9999999% purity.
Even with 7 9's of purity, one still needs to grow defect-free silicon crystals, cut them into wafers and then dope those wafers so the silicon becomes a semiconductor rather than remaining a insulator as pure silicon tends to be.