The Connection Between Quartz and Silicon

It is impossible to make leading edge semiconductors without the silica pulled out of Spruce Pine. Inside your phone. Your laptop. Weapons. Every server and every data center that powers AI, air semiconductors formed on little sections of pure silicon, called chips, because the little square they're all built on is chipped off a much larger block. It is how that much larger block of silicon is made. That makes the quartz at Spruce Pine irreplaceable, truly irreplaceable.

And that is not hyperbole, which I have to say, because it's extremely rare to have a hypercritical global industry in the modern world rely on one little piece of land. This irreplaceable land is the choke point that could be used to determine which countries can make advanced chips and which can’t. This is why China can't suddenly overtake the US chip industry. Why taking Taiwan does not guarantee China would suddenly be able to make high end chips, Because if the US stopped providing the quartz from Spruce Pine, Taiwan ceases to operate full stop.

But where is this connection between quartz and silicon? This ultrapure quartz ultrapure silica is turned into silicon. Not quite actually. That is exactly what those who make silicon try to avoid. Pull apart your phone and inside you'll see where the brain that powers your phone is. Inside of this casing, right here is an advanced semiconductor that, in a pristine state would look like this. Just three millimeters tall.

A perfectly polished piece of pure silicon etched into it using a process that could be mistaken for magic are billions of tiny pathways. The width of each measured in atoms. We're talking 40, maybe 50 atoms wide for each path. If a random iron or oxygen atom is baked into the silicon, when an attempt to create one of these pathways is made, the pathway will not be made. Fail to create just one of the paths and the whole thing must be thrown out.

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