"The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a single quartz factory in North Carolina"
(130 points 6 months ago | 97 comments)
If 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.
As 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
The 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?
Possibly 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?
We 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.
Any 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
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Seems like it already is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz#Synthetic_and_artificia...
No mention there of purity though.
Well 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?
It’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.
You 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.