Semiconductor wafers (was One-Way Trip to Mars Offered by Dutch Company)

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Al Globus wrote:
> We need to develop new space industries [...] Space tourism and space solar power fit the bill. If you can think of anything else capable, if all goes very well, of providing a market in the 10,000s of launches per year range, please let me know.

Large-diameter thin semiconductor wafer fabrication. On the surface of Earth, semiconductor wafers tend to sag under the force of gravity and hence, to overcome this, have to be made thicker as they are made wider. Chips made from wider wafers are cheaper, but this economy is offset by the increased thickness. Wafers might potentially be made in micro-gravity of arbitrarily large diameters while remaining as thin as the original one-inch wafers that were state-of-the-art decades ago.