[jagged-chisel]

I would imagine, as it stands today, that packing rectangular chips into elliptical wafers has a certain amount of waste that can also be recycled. Actually, I suppose it would be less wasteful to fill the ellipse with rectangles up to the safe edge than it would to lop off entire sides of a boule to make a rectangle for filling.

I don’t mean to insinuate you are wrong - I need an education on how this rectangle business is better. Maybe they’re just trying to remove the “lop the sides off” step?

[pclmulqdq]

Packing rectangular chips onto circles has waste, but that waste cannot be recycled. It has been processed through a lot of different steps that contaminate it. I'm not sure if it gets recycled, but it's going to be a lot harder to recycle than large chunks of pure silicon.

[jagged-chisel]

Ah, makes sense. I hadn’t even considered the process of etching the chips. Pretty high contaminant-to-silicon ratio for sure.

Thanks for answering!