How pure can a piece of quartz be after a hurricane? So pure that the entire semiconductor industry breathed a sigh of relief.
When Hurricane Helen ravaged North Carolina, who would have thought that the fate of a small town would tug at the nerves of the global tech community? Spruce Pine, a little-known town, is the "heart" of the semiconductor industry. Why? Because the quartz produced here is of outrageous purity.
Isn't quartz, you might ask, just sand? Wrong! It's not the kind you get right on the beach. Spruce Pine's quartz, 99.999% pure. For example, if you zoom in to the size of the globe, the impurities in it may not be as large as a grain of sand. This kind of "cleanliness" level of purity is exactly what semiconductor chips dream of.
However, Hurricane Helen doesn't matter if you're the darling of the tech world or not. It taught Spruce Pine a hard lesson, causing Sibelco, the largest local producer of high-purity quartz, to halt production for 10 days. In the past 10 days, executives in the global semiconductor industry have been unable to sleep. After all, without this ultra-pure quartz, chip manufacturing is as mad as a chef without a pot.
Fortunately, Sibelco's employees are even tougher than quartz. Just 10 days later, they were getting the line up and running again. Hilmar Rode, CEO of Sibelco, said: "Our employees have demonstrated extraordinary resilience and team spirit. "I have to say that this spirit is more rare than 99.999% purity.
You may ask, why are the world's high-tech companies staring at such a small town? The answer is simple: the quartz deposits at Spruce Pine are like a huge joke played by nature. The quartz here is not only of high purity, but also has a terrifying amount of reserves, more than 10 million tons. It's like a gold mine popping up in your backyard, and it's the biggest and purest in the world.
Interestingly, the town, together with another company, The Quartz Corp, controls 80% of the high-purity quartz market in the Asia-Pacific region. Most of the chips in smartphones, computers, and cars in the world rely on the "sand" of this town to operate. Isn't this a bit like a sci-fi movie?
Now that Sibelco is back shipping to customers, tech companies around the world can finally breathe a sigh of relief. However, this incident is also a wake-up call. Isn't it a little too "fragile" for a change in a small town to affect the global technology supply chain?
Then again, the next time you see a grain of sand, you might as well use it to become the "brain" of the next iPhone, if it's pure enough.
By the way, do you think there will be "artificial quartz" in the future? Or should we worry about diversifying the supply of this critical resource? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section. After all, the future of science and technology may be hidden in a different "sand".