Silicon Wafer with RAM Memory Chips - 6 inch

About this Artwork: This wafer is 6" in diameter and was made in 1989. It has about 280 computer memory chips on it. The chips are Dallas Semiconductor DS2257 CMOS SRAM memory chips. These memory chips held 256K bits of data. It was organized as 2K 8-bit words. The image behind the wafer is of this silicon wafer. The wafer is placed over one of the chips. You can see the edges of the other chips surrounding it. These memory chips would have been used in low power computer applications. About Making Computer Chips: Computer chips start out as ordinary sand, which is silicon dioxide. However, the silicon must be made very, very pure. The first step is to melt the sand, in a furnace that reaches about 3200o F, and mix with carbon. This first purification process creates 99% pure Silicon, a common output is Silicon Carbide. The Silicon Carbide is processed in a trichlorosilane distillation method to create 99.9999% pure silicon called polycrystalline silicon. The polysilicon is broken up