[ben_w]

OTOH, remote space colonies get zero-g manufacturing, along with free vaccum so hard that makes our best artificial vaccum systems seem like a Florida garden during a hurricane in comparison.

What they get to do may not help with DIY in a garage on Earth.

[thesz]

Zero-g adds nothing. You cannot even purify silicon in zero-g, you need some-g for impurities to go up and down.

The average distance between molecules of the atmosphere is 3.3nm, this is about 10 times of the typical atom diameter. You need 1/1000 of the standard atmosphere pressure to make this distance ten times bigger. Which will pretty much be the hard vacuum at the scale of the atom manipulation.

[ben_w]

> You cannot even purify silicon in zero-g, you need some-g for impurities to go up and down.

Only if you're using the purification technique that was developed for use on Earth that takes advantage of Earth's gravity.

There's other ways to purify silicon. Off the top of my head and not because it's necessarily a good idea even in zero-g*, there's the Calutron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron

> The average distance between molecules of the atmosphere is 3.3nm, this is about 10 times of the typical atom diameter. You need 1/1000 of the standard atmosphere pressure to make this distance ten times bigger. Which will pretty much be the hard vacuum at the scale of the atom manipulation.

That's famously how gases differ from liquids and solids, yes.

I'm more pointing towards it being easier to control the doping of the semiconductors when you don't need to worry about the presence of oxygen (or water vapour), and that this is a very very clean "clean room" that you get for free without having to filter out the dust** or pollen because there wasn't any in the first place.

* it might be cost effective or not, I'm making no claim either way because I don't care enough to try and engineer something like this and then compare it to the alternatives

** depending on where you go in space, of course; I'm just saying you can pick a place without any, you're not obliged to do this e.g. next to an asteroid.