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Comment by alkibiades | Hacker News Reader

so how expensive would this material be to make? i’ve seen everyone say potential uses but i just wanna know if it’s economically feasible

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The bulk cost of this material is not going to be the problem with commercialization. The ingredients and labor aren't very expensive. The problem is that no one has found a process to consistently make chunks bigger than like a rice grain of this stuff.

If you can grow it in a constrainted geometry a grain of rice is a very large footprint for IC design.

The real revolution with something like this is in IC design (computers & Sensors) and maybe Transformer/Inductor/Coil design. Nobody is realistically expecting to roll out hoverboards or HVDC cables with this crystal.

Wouldn't we need it to be a semiconductor to be useful for ICs? Also what kind of ICs are we talking here? The handful of nanometer cutting edge stuff for compute or power ICs for charging circuits and similar stuff?

I think they're talking about using it for all of the connections between the gates.

People aren’t even certain it’s real. Why would anyone have a clue about the mass production or creation of larger chunks yet?

People aren't certain it's real because they're having so much difficulty producing chunks of it. You can't measure superconductivity in a powder.

idk they’re talking like if it’s real then we’ll have all these breakthroughs. so wanted to know if even if it’s real if it may be in feasible economically

The lead content may well be a barrier to commercialization. There are plenty of use cases for which a material that is likely brittle and contains a large fraction of lead is a problem.

(If this is real, I would expect other related materials that don’t contain lead to be found.)

Like $20 per kilo + energy and labor

For context, copper is around 7 per kilo.

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