3 ms·

This is addressed at the end of the article. "...Mollick makes it clear in his social media thread that, yes, fully synthetic techniques are available to creat

by chasil 3y ago

This is addressed at the end of the article. "...Mollick makes it clear in his social media thread that, yes, fully synthetic techniques are available to create similarly pure quartz. However, any sudden closure or interruption of the mining at Spruce Pine would likely cause "pretty catastrophic" disruption (and extra expense) for a few years as the industry scales up manufacturing." I understand that 25% of all neon production was coming out of Mariupol, Ukraine (and another 25% out of Odessa) prior to the war. It would be interesting to see how the industry coped with a 50% loss of supply. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-ukraine-halts-half-worlds-neon-output-chips-clouding-outlook-2022-03-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-ukraine-halts-h...

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Even then, I disagree with the characterization in that last sentence. When billions (trillions?) of dollars are on the line, people and organizations tend to move with a degree of urgency not seen in the normal course of business.
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  I agree that it wouldn't be catastrophic, but we just saw a semiconductor shortage during COVID. For a lot of us end-users, that mainly meant that we couldn't get a Raspberry Pi, but it did affect some industries where a lot of Micro-controllers (including simple 8-bit AVRs) and even stuff like ADC/DACs weren't available at all or only for way jacked up prices for a while. I think the automotive industry also suffered from that despite all their money because they couldn't just swing a magic wand to make a chip foundry appear in their backyard. But in the end, everything was fine because as you say, eventually everyone is going to move.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    It doesn’t sound like this would cause any short term pain really, just make it harder to spin up new capacity.
  - dopylitty 3y ago
    Was everything fine in the end? We would probably never hear about it if for a completely made up example an extra 10k people died because some medical device was being made without some microprocessor that made it more effective or reliable. It’s possible for things with large scale effects to have large impacts without it becoming well known by people not working in the affected industry or directly impacted.
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      It's a good point - I was more talking about society as a whole, since we didn't collapse. And we wouldn't collapse if some Quartz mind in North Carolina closes either. But yes, on an individual level, it can be severe. Like the employees of car manufacturers who lost their jobs because they couldn't make cars for a while because they didn't have the chips needed.
      - chii 3y ago
        society didnt collapse, but some people bore more of the burden than others.
    - InitialLastName 3y ago
      As another example, I (and many other hardware engineers I know) spent 2021 doing essentially remediation on current designs to keep things in production (by designing in new parts). If there hadn't been shortages, we could have spent that time designing new products that will now either never be released or come to market a year later than they otherwise would have (preventing their use for that year).
- tedsanders 3y ago
  Even with billions on the line, semiconductor shortages can take years to resolve. Consider the 2020–2023 chip shortage, which hit automakers especially hard. When COVID19 struck in 2020, car sales plunged by 30%–90%, inducing many automakers to cancel future chip orders. Then when demand rebounded unexpectedly quickly, automakers found that there were not enough chips to buy, nor enough available manufacturing capacity to make them. This shortage of chips was severe. Every major automaker (including Toyota,Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and GM) were forced to idle manufacturing plants. In 2021 alone, the chip shortage reduced auto production by ~11 million vehicles, costing an estimated $210B in auto revenue(!). In response, the White House convened 3 summits and signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Building extra semiconductor manufacturing tools takes years. Even in late 2022, lead times of various tools were as high as 24-30 months, and lead times of some chips were still over 100 weeks. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars of automotive revenue (tens of billions of profit) were sitting as a prize to anyone who could make some extra chips for automakers. And this is a relatively “easy” task - automotive is only a small ~10% slice of the semiconductor market, and doesn’t even need the leading edge technology nodes, where production is even more bottlenecked. Yet even with this massive prize of billions of dollars, the industry couldn’t match this demand in under 3 years. It’s not for lack of skill or effort — these companies have hundreds of thousands of employees, a large fraction with advanced degrees — but simply because the modern semiconductor supply chain is fantastically complex. When designing a supply chain, cost trades off against resilience. If you minimize cost (e.g., single sourcing crucibles from the lowest cost provider), you lose resilience (e.g., it may take you months to recover from that single source going offline unexpectedly).
  - chasil 3y ago
    One easy way for the automakers to solve their problems would be to exploit Moore's law, and move all of their designs to a 28nm planar node of transistor production (which are somewhat more durable than the smaller FINFET nodes). Because many of them were still at 180nm (or higher), they wasted the silicon material with a much larger die size. Spend the money to stay current. Nobody is going to mass-produce vacuum tubes for you overnight.
  - Retric 3y ago
- hgomersall 3y ago
  Small correction: billions on the line over the time period of the current generation of CEOs' tenures.
philipkglass 3y ago
Neon supply disruption started earlier with the Donbas war, so companies were already adapting to the neon squeeze. Approaches used include developing neon production capacity outside of Ukraine, optimizing process control to reduce neon consumption, and recycling neon gas that would formerly have been vented to the atmosphere: "Gigaphoton Announces Neon Gas Rescue Program" (2015) https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150708005017/en/Gigaphoton-Announces-Neon-Gas-Rescue-Program https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150708005017/en/Gig... "Linde installs neon production facility at ASU in Texas" (2016) https://www.gasworld.com/story/linde-installs-neon-production-facility-at-asu-in-texas/ https://www.gasworld.com/story/linde-installs-neon-productio... "Noble gases and the shock of war: Laser and semiconductor manufacturers adjust to price increases while securing supply chains" (2023) https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/mayjune-2023/supplying-noble-gases-for-photonics-in-war-time https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/mayjune-2023/supplying... "Samsung to use recycled neon gas in chip manufacturing" (2024) https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked202403070022 https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2024...

by chasil 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Even then, I disagree with the characterization in that last sentence. When billions (trillions?) of dollars are on the line, people and organizations tend to move with a degree of urgency not seen in the normal course of business.

MenhirMike 3y ago
I agree that it wouldn't be catastrophic, but we just saw a semiconductor shortage during COVID. For a lot of us end-users, that mainly meant that we couldn't get a Raspberry Pi, but it did affect some industries where a lot of Micro-controllers (including simple 8-bit AVRs) and even stuff like ADC/DACs weren't available at all or only for way jacked up prices for a while. I think the automotive industry also suffered from that despite all their money because they couldn't just swing a magic wand to make a chip foundry appear in their backyard. But in the end, everything was fine because as you say, eventually everyone is going to move.
- TylerE 3y ago
  It doesn’t sound like this would cause any short term pain really, just make it harder to spin up new capacity.
- dopylitty 3y ago
  Was everything fine in the end? We would probably never hear about it if for a completely made up example an extra 10k people died because some medical device was being made without some microprocessor that made it more effective or reliable. It’s possible for things with large scale effects to have large impacts without it becoming well known by people not working in the affected industry or directly impacted.
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    It's a good point - I was more talking about society as a whole, since we didn't collapse. And we wouldn't collapse if some Quartz mind in North Carolina closes either. But yes, on an individual level, it can be severe. Like the employees of car manufacturers who lost their jobs because they couldn't make cars for a while because they didn't have the chips needed.
    - chii 3y ago
      society didnt collapse, but some people bore more of the burden than others.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    As another example, I (and many other hardware engineers I know) spent 2021 doing essentially remediation on current designs to keep things in production (by designing in new parts). If there hadn't been shortages, we could have spent that time designing new products that will now either never be released or come to market a year later than they otherwise would have (preventing their use for that year).
tedsanders 3y ago
Even with billions on the line, semiconductor shortages can take years to resolve. Consider the 2020–2023 chip shortage, which hit automakers especially hard. When COVID19 struck in 2020, car sales plunged by 30%–90%, inducing many automakers to cancel future chip orders. Then when demand rebounded unexpectedly quickly, automakers found that there were not enough chips to buy, nor enough available manufacturing capacity to make them. This shortage of chips was severe. Every major automaker (including Toyota,Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and GM) were forced to idle manufacturing plants. In 2021 alone, the chip shortage reduced auto production by ~11 million vehicles, costing an estimated $210B in auto revenue(!). In response, the White House convened 3 summits and signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Building extra semiconductor manufacturing tools takes years. Even in late 2022, lead times of various tools were as high as 24-30 months, and lead times of some chips were still over 100 weeks. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars of automotive revenue (tens of billions of profit) were sitting as a prize to anyone who could make some extra chips for automakers. And this is a relatively “easy” task - automotive is only a small ~10% slice of the semiconductor market, and doesn’t even need the leading edge technology nodes, where production is even more bottlenecked. Yet even with this massive prize of billions of dollars, the industry couldn’t match this demand in under 3 years. It’s not for lack of skill or effort — these companies have hundreds of thousands of employees, a large fraction with advanced degrees — but simply because the modern semiconductor supply chain is fantastically complex. When designing a supply chain, cost trades off against resilience. If you minimize cost (e.g., single sourcing crucibles from the lowest cost provider), you lose resilience (e.g., it may take you months to recover from that single source going offline unexpectedly).
- chasil 3y ago
  One easy way for the automakers to solve their problems would be to exploit Moore's law, and move all of their designs to a 28nm planar node of transistor production (which are somewhat more durable than the smaller FINFET nodes). Because many of them were still at 180nm (or higher), they wasted the silicon material with a much larger die size. Spend the money to stay current. Nobody is going to mass-produce vacuum tubes for you overnight.
- Retric 3y ago
hgomersall 3y ago
Small correction: billions on the line over the time period of the current generation of CEOs' tenures.

philipkglass 3y ago

Neon supply disruption started earlier with the Donbas war, so companies were already adapting to the neon squeeze. Approaches used include developing neon production capacity outside of Ukraine, optimizing process control to reduce neon consumption, and recycling neon gas that would formerly have been vented to the atmosphere: "Gigaphoton Announces Neon Gas Rescue Program" (2015) https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150708005017/en/Gigaphoton-Announces-Neon-Gas-Rescue-Program https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150708005017/en/Gig... "Linde installs neon production facility at ASU in Texas" (2016) https://www.gasworld.com/story/linde-installs-neon-production-facility-at-asu-in-texas/ https://www.gasworld.com/story/linde-installs-neon-productio... "Noble gases and the shock of war: Laser and semiconductor manufacturers adjust to price increases while securing supply chains" (2023) https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/mayjune-2023/supplying-noble-gases-for-photonics-in-war-time https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/mayjune-2023/supplying... "Samsung to use recycled neon gas in chip manufacturing" (2024) https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked202403070022 https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2024...