Will semiconductor manufacturing be derailed by Hurricane Helene?

The deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina has additionally drawn consideration for its potential disruptions to the tech business. Destruction from Hurricane Helene is threatening one of many business’s main provide chains – a North Carolina mining city that provides high-purity quartz essential for manufacturing the chips present in smartphones and information centres worldwide.

The mining city of Spruce Pine is among the many many US communities impacted by Hurricane Helene, which killed greater than 200 folks in a number of states, displaced 1000’s and left greater than 1,000,000 houses and companies with out energy. The storm pushed 900 kilometres inland from the Florida coast and inflicted lethal floods throughout a large area, even reaching deep throughout the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, the place the Spruce Pine quartz mines are situated.

Here’s what you must find out about how Helene’s ripple results may influence the tech business.

Why is high-purity quartz so essential?

Excessive-purity quartz is used to make fused-quartz crucibles, cylindrical containers which can be key to the chip-manufacturing course of as a result of they’ll endure the excessive temperatures required to soften silicon. The melting-point temperature for semiconductor-grade polysilicon is round 1425°C (2597°F), and quartz crucibles can usually stand up to temperatures of as much as 1650°C (3000°F).

Within the chip manufacturing course of, the fused-quartz crucibles are full of molten silicon. A silicon seed crystal is dipped into the melted silicon throughout the spinning crucible in order that it could develop right into a considerably bigger silicon ingot earlier than being step by step drawn out. A totally grown ingot can weigh over 500 kilograms.

These silicon ingots are then reduce into silicon wafers, which in flip might be imprinted with the transistor patterns that kind the muse of recent laptop chips.

The place does high-purity quartz come from?

The pure deposits of quartz present in Spruce Pine originated when North America and Africa collided to kind the supercontinent Pangaea about 300 million years in the past. That course of created the Appalachian mountains and likewise compelled a part of Earth’s oceanic crust to sink beneath North America, the place the extreme warmth and stress close to the planet’s mantle melted ocean sediment and rock.

The ensuing lava slowly cooled over time to kind pegmatite rock deposits containing giant mineral crystals – together with high-purity quartz. These pegmatite formations finally grew to become extra accessible close to the floor due to extra geological upheaval and weathering.

How did Hurricane Helene influence quartz mining operations?

The Spruce Pine mining district presently has quartz mining and refining operations owned by Belgium-based Sibelco and Norway-based The Quartz Corp. Each corporations shut down operations on 26 September and haven’t but stated after they would possibly restart.

The businesses say they’ve confirmed the protection of their workers and contractors within the space – and so they described comparatively minimal direct injury to their amenities.

“The preliminary evaluation signifies that our working amenities within the Spruce Pine area have solely sustained minor injury,” stated Sibelco in a 3 October assertion. “Our devoted groups are on-site, conducting cleanup and restore actions to restart operations as quickly as we will.”

“Now we have been in a position to conduct the primary visible inspections of our crops and it will seem that injury is usually concentrated round ancillary items,” stated The Quartz Corp in a assertion on 2 October. However the firm additionally cautioned that resumption of mining operations “may even rely on the rebuilding of native infrastructure” – lots of the roads within the space have been closed and broken within the instant wake of the storm.

Equally, Sibelco referenced energy outages from the storm as one problem. “Restoring energy stays essential to resuming our operations,” stated the corporate in its assertion. “The restore of energy traces resulting in our crops has progressed considerably.”

The Quartz Corp additionally described having stockpiles of quartz in Norway that might be utilized in ongoing purification processing operations, together with extra “security shares of completed merchandise” that might keep away from any essential shortages for purchasers – together with semiconductor producers – within the quick or medium time period.

Will Helene disrupt the provision of semiconductors?

Main semiconductor producers have stated that they presently don’t anticipate disruptions to their operations within the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

TSMC, a Taiwanese firm that’s the world’s main chip maker, described having “numerous international suppliers” to attract upon. “Via an efficient danger administration system and shut partnerships with suppliers, we presently don’t anticipate any vital influence on the corporate’s operations,” says a TSMC spokesperson. “We’ll preserve monitoring the state of affairs carefully.”

Samsung Electronics, which ranks because the second largest chip maker and is headquartered in South Korea, advised New Scientist that the corporate’s operations weren’t affected.

GlobalFoundries, the most important semiconductor producer primarily based within the US, described itself as having the “flexibility to leverage different sources for key provides” with chip-making amenities on three continents. “We’re involved with our international suppliers and don’t anticipate any disruption to our provide of quartz attributable to Hurricane Helene,” says a GlobalFoundries spokesperson.

Corporations that produce uncooked silicon wafers presently have wafer stockpiles adequate to final anyplace from three to eight months, stated Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis, an unbiased analysis agency, in a social media put up.

Are there different sources of quartz for the worldwide semiconductor business?

Spruce Pine “has a close to distinctive mixture of purity, availability and value,” wrote Ed Conway, a journalist at Sky Information and creator of Materials World, in a Substack put up. However he additionally pointed to different high-purity quartz mines in China, Russia and Brazil.

Pure high-purity quartz deposits are “scarce”, however corporations can use purification strategies if wanted and even synthetically produce pure quartz, stated Patel. He additionally pointed to the corporate Ferroglobe, which acquired a high-purity quartz mine in South Carolina in October 2023. An organization press launch projected that mining operations may start within the second half of 2024.