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Essential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene
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- asciimike 2y agoPossibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
- throwup238 2y agoWe can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it. High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
- justinclift 2y agoAny idea how big these quartz crystals needs to be? Single crystal sapphires ~250kg are grown in production, so it should be possible with reasonable effort to do similar for quartz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyropoulos_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyropoulos_method --- Seems like it already is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz#Synthetic_and_artificial_treatments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz#Synthetic_and_artificia... No mention there of purity though.
- throwup238 2y agoIt’s not the size that’s hard but the 99.9999% purity. The quartz from these mines is crushed, sorted for impurities, and fused/annealed into larger crystals before they’re ready for the semiconductor industry.
- foreverobama 2y ago[dead]
- KeplerBoy 2y agoWell that's not nearly as neat looking as I naively expected a large sapphire to look like. I suppose the usual gem color arises from the impurities?
- justinclift 2y agoThey seem pretty ugly if they're not cut. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INytU_pdkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INytU_pdkg
- pjc50 2y agoThe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method is the actual big crystal growing process, to which this quartz is just the input. Effectively we repeatedly make a crystal with the impurities moved to the end, then saw off the end and discard it, then re-melt the crystal to make it even purer.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe single crystals of silicon that are made are cylinders with a diameter of 0.3 meter and a height probably of around 2 meter or even more. The crucible must be bigger than that. The crucible is made from fused quartz glass. So the mine does not need to have big quartz crystals. They must be only pure. The mined crystals are melted together and processed like any glass, except that processing quartz glass is difficult, due to the very high melting point and the high viscosity of the melted quartz. The melting of the pure quartz requires itself a crucible made from materials that resist to even higher temperatures, e.g. a crucible of molybdenum or even a crucible of iridium, for the lowest contamination with impurities.
- westurner 2y agoCan nanoassembly produce quartz more efficiently? /? nanoassembly of quartz https://www.google.com/search?q=nanoassembly%20of%20quartz https://www.google.com/search?q=nanoassembly%20of%20quartz mentions hydrothermal synthesis, Which other natural processes affect the formation of quartz and gold? From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437036#41442489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437036#41442489 : > "Gold nugget formation from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01514-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01514-1 [...] > Are there phononic excitations from earthquake-induced piezoelectric and pyroelectric effects? > Do (surface) plasmon polaritons SPhP affect the interactions between quartz and gold, given heat and vibration as from an earthquake? > "Extreme light confinement and control in low-symmetry phonon-polaritonic crystals" like quartz https://arxiv.org/html/2312.06805v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2312.06805v2
- zakqwy 2y agoWe can, using big autoclaves and a process called hydrothermal synthesis. It's how we make single crystals that get sliced and diced into quartz oscillators. But the process takes a long time, think mm/day, and isn't really appropriate for making big things like crucibles.
- throwup238 2y agoAs far as I know there are several other companies selling quartz as pure as Spruce Pine, they’re just more expensive because Spruce Pine has an old and well developed industry. This is an opportunity for other vendors to invest in their processes enough to take the market while Quartz Corp, et al are rebuilding. Hereus Conamic and WACKER Chemie come to mind
- doctorpangloss 2y agoAnother POV is that every shortage you and I, as laypeople, have ever experienced, has been the result of something strictly political, like trade agreements, unstable governments, poor worker rights, poor property rights, etc. When the reason for a shortage appears to be economic, like "just more expensive," it is the result of political economic decisions like tariffs, or political business decisions like certifications. You know a lot more about quartz manufacturing: do you sincerely think that someone in China couldn't figure out how to make the quartz (or whatever) cheaply?
- throwup238 2y agoIt’s quartz, the most common mineral on this planet. Literally any mainland country on this planet has enough to start their own industry. China has been trying as part of its latest (14th) five year plan but there’s a reason so much of the semiconductor supply chain is in Japan, Korea, US, and Europe: labor costs aren’t the driving force. It’s energy and capital equipment and intellectual property and decades of expertise with quality control. Everything else is secondary.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoHow do you really know where a Japanese or Korean vendor gets their stuff? “Trust me bro?”
- snypher 2y ago"How do you really know where a US vendor gets their stuff?"
- js2 2y ago"The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a single quartz factory in North Carolina" (130 points 6 months ago | 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248
- gnulinux 2y ago@hn_throwaway_99 wrote in that thread: > These types of articles/pronouncement always tend to make a connection that is nearly never warranted. That is, the article quotes this tweet that says "The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers." But the first sentence doesn't really follow from the second. > That is, even if all the silicon wafers are made from this quartz from NC today, it's not really because that is the only possible option, it's because that quartz is the highest quality that can be procured at a relatively low price. But if that factory and quarry went away tomorrow, I have no doubt that the worldwide semiconductor industry would quickly adjust to a different quartz supplier. > I think it's still a very cool factoid, but the subtext that "the whole world economy 'hinges' on a teeny NC town" is false. We'll see if they're right...
- a_vanderbilt 2y agoThe Black Hills are a relatively obscure source of the semiconductor-grade quartz we use in everything from chips to nuclear warheads. Protests in Asheville about non-proliferation have popped up about it for years. I expect there will be measurable effects from this incident, and hopefully, some of those will be in local policy to prevent it from happening again. Asheville was my second home, and it's sad to see WNC suffer like this.
- brightball 2y agoI’m just a little south of there and watching what has happened is gut wrenching.
- jkhdigital 2y agoAbout four years ago my parents got a cabin up in the mountains right along the NC-TN border, and we’ve been up there almost every summer since. Just last month we went tubing on the North Toe, so I know exactly where that CSX rail line is. Just wish I had the free time to go and help volunteer!
- pfdietz 2y agoCorrection: the quartz here is used for making crucibles, not the silicon for chips themselves. The latter is far more pure than this quartz could be, and is produced by a multistage purification process (involving distillation of trichlorosilane) starting with relatively impure metallurgical silicon. And that is produced by reducing quartz with carbon in an arc furnace, so unless that carbon is extremely pure (and it's not) you're introducing impurities anyway.
- Animats 2y agoIf you want to invest in a company with a nearby undeveloped quartz deposit, there's someone looking for money.[1] Of course, it might be a scam. [1] https://gusherknob.com/project-goals/ https://gusherknob.com/project-goals/
- tedunangst 2y agoThe source for the claim that a 2008 fire impacted the market merely repeats the claim without any further detail. What happened? Does anyone remember being unable to find a core 2 quad Q9400 because of the shortage?
- samus 2y agoA limited fire will only temporarily impact supply since companies have reserves of the stuff. Anyways, the market was much smaller back then, and everyone's attention in 2008/09 was rather on the crisis...
- madaxe_again 2y agoYou wouldn’t believe how fragile some of our supply chains are, and how many single points of failure we have. For a while a decade and a bit ago, there was only one operational, legal tantalum smelter on the planet - the others had been destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami or shut down over their use of conflict minerals and slavery. I think there are now three - all on the ring of fire. Then you’ve got stuff like cobalt, which we get at the whim of the DRC, a notoriously stable and functional state. And of course, gallium, graphite, and rare earths, which pretty much all come from China. They could, at will, bring the global electronics supply chain to its knees. I guess risk is everywhere, really, in our fragile systems.
- AdamN 2y agoOne advantage of these types of things is how easy they are to stockpile. Aside from the nominal storage costs, none of these things degrade over time: https://www.dla.mil/Strategic-Materials/ https://www.dla.mil/Strategic-Materials/
- mschuster91 2y agoStockpiles and other forms of resiliency (such as redundant facilities) cost a lot of money because by definition you cannot run them at nominal capacity or it's just a ton of expensive stuff that sits around. Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of accounting for resiliency as it optimizes to cut such "dead costs".
- lancebeet 2y agoToyota, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of JIT manufacturing, famously began stockpiling microchips after the Fukushima disaster disrupted their supply chains. It might not make sense to stockpile raw materials, but stockpiling things with comparatively low storage costs w.r.t. the item cost sometimes makes sense from a capitalist perspective. This assumes the company runs with a long-term perspective in mind, which often isn't the case in western companies that are publicly traded or owned/operated by investment firms. In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.
- yellow_lead 2y agoA large typhoon is also ~1 day away from hitting Taiwan, but I think TSMC is well prepared for it.
- tuatoru 2y agoEd Conway's book Material World has more about silicon. An even more obscure mine in Spain is used for the quartz to make the crucibles that hold molten silicon. For some reason its melting point is just far enough above that of silicon metal to make the process feasible. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Materials-Modern-Civilization/dp/0593534344 https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Materials-Modern-Civil...
- MeteorMarc 2y agoSo, from the viewpoint of climate change this flood is positive feedback.
- protomolecule 2y agoNegative
- bogwog 2y agoHow so?
- longitudinal93 2y agoI take u/MeteorMarc to be saying with the current rush to build and power data centres and the additional greenhouses gases released thereby, any slowdown in this will be helpful in our attempts to address climate change. In this case you could almost look at it as climate change solving itself!
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- loganfrederick 2y agoThe research analyst at SemiAnalysis put out a Twitter thread yesterday explaining why he thinks the impact to the global supply chain is overstated here: https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617 https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617 "In conclusion – existing wafer inventory provides a buffer as mining operations restart, major companies are already using synthetic methods to produce semiconductor-grade quartz crucibles, and there are other sources of HPQ. Spruce Pine FUD is exaggerated."
- mikeyouse 2y agoInteresting related article I found just browsing some news and trying to understand the impacts; "The Semiconductor Apocalypse No One Would See Coming" https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/the-semiconductor-apocalypse-no-one https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/the-semiconductor-apocalyps...
- chasil 2y agoIf Google is telling me the truth, 300mm silicon wafers are about $75. Would the loss of the North Carolina quartz bring a major increase? It is said that alternative (higher cost) substitutes are available.
- adsmanaged 2y agoHere's a compiled list of local charities, nonprofits, and volunteer opportunities to support the Hurricane Helene relief efforts: https://kharity.com/hurricane-helene/ https://kharity.com/hurricane-helene/