News The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina

[Admin]

A mine in North Carolina is 'the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers', and if it closed, the 'catastrophic' disruption to the semiconductor business would be felt for years.

The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North Carolina : Read more

 

[thisisaname]

Never heard of the place.

 

[Blastomonas]

This is either a great idea for their share prices or bad marketing for terrorists.

 

[bit_user]

This is either a great idea for their share prices or bad marketing for terrorists.

That aspect does worry me. Then again, if no one is aware that such a single point of failure exists, there's less chance of redundancies being added. So, it can be a bit of a catch-22.

It turns out lots of industries have such bottlenecks in their supply chain, and we rarely discover them until something goes wrong. I remember there was a fire at a plant which produced the specialized plastic used in automotive brake lines, and it was estimated to stay offline for a couple years for all the necessary repairs. It turned out that one plant served like 60% of the market, leading to fears that fewer cars could be shipped due to an inability to simply outfit them with brake lines. I never heard whether it did finally affect automotive production or whether enough other production capacity could be shifted to meet demand. Probably, the fact that I didn't hear more about it says that the industry managed to cope better than expected.

 

[USAFRet]

This is similar to pool chlorine a couple of years ago.

There were apparently only 3 factories in the US that made pool chlorine.
One of them burned down.

Result - Immediate freakout, price spike, and short term shortages.


This quartz mine is worse, because it appears to be a single source.

 

[zanfarix]

I do not believe this to be entirely true. The silica is mined at Spruce Pines, but it's refined to it's final purity in Norway. Before the silica was shipped in to Norway the plant used local sources for ultra pure quartz and Norway is rich in pegmatites. Most value chains today are driven by cost cutting until there only remains the few which are the most profitable. There often are several dormant sources that can be tapped if the market shifts. The failure of a plant or source to deliver always creates delays, but a complete collapse seems rare if not unprecedented.

 

[bit_user]

The failure of a plant or source to deliver always creates delays, but a complete collapse seems rare if not unprecedented.

The article did acknowledge that alternate sources could be scaled up, but that takes time. Recall that semiconductor manufacturing is a high-volume business, very capital-intensive, often "just-in-time", and often operating very near peak capacity. If silicon supply were suddenly cut to a fraction, I have no doubt that the implications for fabs and their various downstream customers would be fairly catastrophic, even out to the mid-term time frame. I think we could anticipate it being much worse than what we experienced, during the pandemic era supply crunch.