[jerf]

Well, let's see, a modern chips die size is on the order of 300mm^2. Let's be generous (I think) and call it 5mm thick. A single helium canister can contain around 300 cubic feet of helium [1]. Those are nasty units to work with by hand, but https://www.google.com/search?q=%28300+cubic+feet%29+%2F+%28... suggests one such cylinder would be enough for 5.5 million new chips, assuming the entire chip was just helium. You can probably safely add at least two more entire factors of magnitude for the fact the chip will still mostly be silicon (or something), my gut suggests 3 or 4 is probably even closer.

Oh, sure, there will be losses and such, but this is still a trivial expense next to the billions of dollars of fab work that will be required. In these quantities we literally use gold without hardly a second thought for price.

[1]: http://www.praxairdirect.com/Product2_10152_10051_14626_-1_1...

[Retric]

300mm^2 * 5mm = 1.5 milliliters

24k Gold is 42$/gram, 1 gram is 0.052 milliliters.

So, 42 / .052 * 1.5 = 1,211$.

Note: The important parts are not 5mm thick etc, but gold is rather expensive by volume.

[jerf]

Sorry, by "these quantities" I meant "at computer-chip quantities" in general; gold we pretty much use by area, and not much of that, either. The numbers I gave were purposely quite generous for volume. After all, I did say they were probably 3 or 4 orders of magnitude too generous. Per reitzensteinm's post, looks like you can recover another 1.5 or so out of my chip-height estimate, too.