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 trade. Destruction from Hurricane Helene is threatening one of many trade’s main provide chains – a North Carolina mining city that provides high-purity quartz essential for manufacturing the chips present in smartphones and knowledge centres worldwide.

The mining city of Spruce Pine is among the many many US communities impacted by Hurricane Helene, which killed greater than 200 individuals in a number of states, displaced hundreds 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 it’s essential to learn about how Helene’s ripple results might impression the tech trade.

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 face 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 may possibly develop right into a considerably bigger silicon ingot earlier than being steadily drawn out. A totally grown ingot can weigh over 500 kilograms.

These silicon ingots are then lower into silicon wafers, which in flip may be imprinted with the transistor patterns that kind the inspiration 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 pressured a part of Earth’s oceanic crust to sink beneath North America, the place the extraordinary 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 massive mineral crystals – together with high-purity quartz. These pegmatite formations ultimately turned extra accessible close to the floor due to extra geological upheaval and weathering.

How did Hurricane Helene impression quartz mining operations?

The Spruce Pine mining district at the moment has quartz mining and refining operations owned by Belgium-based Sibelco and Norway-based The Quartz Corp. Each firms shut down operations on 26 September and haven’t but stated once they may restart.

The businesses say they’ve confirmed the security of their staff 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 capable of conduct the primary visible inspections of our crops and it will seem that injury is usually concentrated round ancillary models,” stated The Quartz Corp in a assertion on 2 October. However the firm additionally cautioned that resumption of mining operations “will even rely upon the rebuilding of native infrastructure” – lots of the roads within the space had been closed and broken within the speedy 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 strains 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 would keep away from any essential shortages for patrons – together with semiconductor producers – within the quick or medium time period.

Will Helene disrupt the availability of semiconductors?

Main semiconductor producers have stated that they at the moment don’t count on 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 world suppliers” to attract upon. “By means of an efficient danger administration system and shut partnerships with suppliers, we at the moment don’t anticipate any vital impression on the corporate’s operations,” says a TSMC spokesperson. “We’ll maintain monitoring the state of affairs carefully.”

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

GlobalFoundries, the biggest 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 world suppliers and don’t count on any disruption to our provide of quartz resulting from Hurricane Helene,” says a GlobalFoundries spokesperson.

Corporations that produce uncooked silicon wafers at the moment have wafer stockpiles adequate to final anyplace from three to eight months, stated Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis, an impartial analysis agency, in a social media publish.

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

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

Pure high-purity quartz deposits are “scarce”, however firms 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 might start within the second half of 2024.