Item — HN Reader

> junk/e-waste and turn them in to usable products again.

Could you expend on this? In my understanding (armchair-youtube-expert), seminconductor "recycling" is basically burning the device and to scrap the metallic parts then using as usual cyanide+boiling chloride (or mercury) to extract gold. Then throw away everything else.

The less industrial method involves human dissection of such devices (with pre and post burning) to extract Silver/Cooper

3 comments

There's an entire industry in Asia that takes apart computers and boards and industrial equipment, removes the chips, and resells them. Sometimes they even paint part numbers and such on them by hand.

It can be a source of fake chips, but also a source of chips that aren't made anymore.

China seemed to take chips from obsolete motherboards and turn them into boards to allow reuse of old Xeons, at least for awhile there. I can't imagine those chipsets were still being made so I assume that is what was happening. A lot of those old processors were still quite useful but since the motherboard supply had dried up they were cheap e-waste. I can't imagine that kind of recycled product being made here, not least of which because Intel would probably find a way to sue a domestic company out of existence if they even tried.

I am running one right now, ancient 10 core Xeon on a new motherboard, runs as a beast, aircooled (iirc these boards were first designed by russian hackers and appeared on a message board years ago). Anyway, almost everything seems to get recycled/repurposed in China (sd cards, memory chips, styrofoam), heck even if there is no demand but just overstock they find a way to create demand, what do you do with an overstock of ballbearings? Fidget spinners?

Not all recycling. Certain valuable chips are saved for other uses. STM chips are popular for that. You'll also see older Spartan FPGAs repurposed.

Are you serious?

China has a large number of lithography machines. Except for some very high-end 3nm chips that cannot yet be produced, other types of chips can all be manufactured.

In 2024, China's chip export value reached nearly $95 billion. This certainly couldn’t have been achieved through so-called "recycling."

Are you serious?

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you missed my point, I totally agree with what you said and don't think that contradicts my message.