Whether you are picking up your brand new smartphone out of a sleek package or taking out a narrow-smart laptop or wearing a smartwatch, you are bound to be first interested in the user experience. You are impressed by the rich colors of its display, the instant startup of the applications and the lightweight chassis. To the ‘average user,’ these consumer electronics are marvels of software engineering and minimalist industrial design.
But behind those pure glass covers and anodized aluminum shells, there is a complex, micro-scopic city of chemistry, metallurgy and material science. The manufacturers need to think beyond conventional plastics and basic metals to design and create materials that are faster, thinner and more energy-efficient.
But behind the scenes of your favorite tech gadgets are rare earth elements, precious metals and specialized chemical compounds that are mined from all over the world. Lets set aside the glass and discover the interesting and secret materials that make your everyday digital life work!
The Screen: Rare Earths and Indium Tin Oxide
The modern touchscreen is a marvel of materials science. It must be scratch-proof, extremely clear and very sensitive to the electric charge in your hand.
- Indium Tin Oxide (ITO): If you are unaware of how your phone is able to determine exactly where you tapped, the answer is the help of the Indium Tin Oxide. ITO is a rare, transparent and electrically conducting material. It is laid in a very thin layer of a grid just below the screen glass. When your finger touches the screen, it changes the electric field at the exact coordinate location and communicates with a signal to the processor.
- Rare Earth Phosphors: The bright green, intense blue and spectacular red colors of your OLED or LED displays aren’t all on the software end. They are made from rare earths such as Yttrium, Europium and Terbium. These elements have different luminescent properties; they will emit a strong light when excited by electric currents, and thus give us the high-contrast images we desire from our modern displays.
The Circuit Board: The Precious Metal Metropolis
The motherboard is the brains of the operation as it will contain all the components of the motherboard including the processor and memory chips and other specialized chipsets. These components communicate billions of electric signals each second, so the materials that they must use to connect them must have almost no electrical resistance.
- Gold and Silver: These are used for critical contact areas and soldering, while copper is used for most circuits. Over time, it will not oxidize or tarnish, so the tiny pins on the CPU will keep in perfect contact with the pins on the motherboard for years.
- Coltantium: Coltantium is the source for tantalum, which is used to make extremely miniature capacitors. Capacitors work in a way similar to electrical reservoirs, and control the flow of power in the device. Tantalum also helps tech giants fit a tremendous amount of electrical storage into components that can fit in a grain of rice, a necessity for maintaining a thin smartphone.
Manufacturing & Finishing: Heavy Metallurgy
There are other key aspects of tech that aren’t inherent in the design of the chip, but are necessary to the numerous heavy manufacturing and surface finishing processes that safeguard and enhance the hardware.
Modern devices experience high stress and use every day, so they are coated with special metallurgical plating to be corrosion and structure resistant. Advanced electroplating and thermal spraying techniques are used in the coating of internal brackets, connectors and structural frames using specialized metals to achieve barriers that are extremely durable.
With high purity chromium powder manufacturers can ensure that the surface finish on key electronic components and internal hardware is protected from humidity, sweat and the environment, ensuring that the product will last long. These are the exact types of metallurgical treatments that are required to keep the interior of our electronics from oxidizing and failing.
The Battery: Lithium-Ion Architecture
Modern tech has been entirely made portable thanks to rechargeable lithium-ion battery technology. Although the term “lithium” is used prominently, they are a blend of special materials.
Cobalt and Nickel: The energy density of batteries, or how much power they can store in relation to their size, is primarily determined by the chemistry of the positive electrode (cathode). Cobalt and Nickel are two materials used to make the positive electrode. Uses of cobalt and nickel are main materials. Cobalt allows the battery to remain chemically stable when it’s rapidly charging and discharging, which helps to prevent overheating or battery fires.
Graphite: The negative electrode (anode) is usually constructed of a pure form of graphite. When you connect your cell phone to the wall, the lithium ions flow to the graphite anode and stay trapped in the nanolayers, holding their energy until you are ready to unplug and use your phone.
The Vibrations and Audio: Neodymium Magnets
But how does your cell phone make loud sound from a speaker smaller than a matchstick? How does it produce the soft, pleasing “haptic click” as you type on a virtual keyboard?
It’s a matter of Neodymium. Neodymium is able to be used to form the strongest permanent magnets in the world. Neodymium is used in combination with iron and boron to produce very strong magnets in a very small amount of space. They’re just less than a few millimeters inside your device to power the tiny voice coils in your speakers and tiny haptic motors for vibrations, but they’re small enough to fit into the machine.
The future of tech and the global footprint.
A hyper-globalized supply chain is needed to unlock these hidden materials. The Tantalum could come from Africa, Indium from Asia, Chromium from North America and the Neodymium from South America, but all in the same high-tech clean rooms, they will combine to make one device.
The electronics industry is facing a problem with rare materials as well as the environmental effects of mining them as demand for those gadgets rises at a fast pace around the world. This has led to a huge drive to e-waste harvesting or electronic recycling and to circular production. Now, tech giants are creating products that can be easily dismantled by a specialized facility that can extract gold, cobalt, rare earth elements and industrial metals to manufacture the next generation of gadgets.
Remember the next time you look at your phone or open your laptop that you are not holding a piece of consumer electronics. In your hand you hold a complex fragment of planetary geology, a beautiful stew of earth’s secrets, a product of human skills.
