Threatening to restrict critical materials matters very little for commodities like rare earths or high purity silica. Process equipment like lithography machines from ASML or other stuff from applied materials is acutally needed and can’t be replaced but high purity … stuff … can be substituted, smuggled, whatever given the need. Industry mostly won’t care and CN government can pour in more money to compensate.
Rare earths consumption in semiconductor is quite small and they can bid higher than everyone else to secure limited supply in case of embargo. Mainly this hurts EV makers and others, not semiconductor. This is similar to jet engine turbine manufacturers not caring about cobalt prices for turbine blades contrasting again to electric vehicles where cobalt prices and scarcity drove R&D aimed at using cheaper materials in batteries.
Retaliation from USA by restricting supplies of high purity quartz is also innefective.
Those might already be being recycled to recover most of the quartz but that’s relatively straightforward to do in a supply crunch.
Low mass compared to polysilicon feedstock used for growing wafers themselves <5%? So tapping supply chain purifying silicon is guaranteed to be enough to make crucibles.
High purity TCS or silane can be diverted from conversion to polysilicon for making wafers to instead be made into fumed silica. This is already done for higher purity fused quartz parts like photomask substrates. Process equipment is easy to make and can be rushed in a supply crunch.
There’s also facilities that grow Quartz crystals for oscillators. Not sure about tonnage but growth is surface area limited. Making sand instead of larger crystals would perhaps 10x deposition rate and drop cycle time which is currently a few months to grow larger crystals down to weeks.
There’s limited supplies in friendly countries (Russia) and domestically.
Free market would find whatever works to get silica meeting purity standards. Easy for crucible manufacturers to test purity.
Not something that halts production, definitely an annoyance.
General remarks
Semiconductor industry can afford to bid quite high to get the supply they need. Relevant historical example is the neon shortage where russian invasion of ukraine disrupted large air liquification/seperation plants associated with ukrainin steelworks and there was drop in Neon production. Free market did its thing, recycling, alternate suppliers etc. and nothing really happened.
Threatening to restrict critical materials matters very little for commodities like rare earths or high purity silica. Process equipment like lithography machines from ASML or other stuff from applied materials is acutally needed and can’t be replaced but high purity … stuff … can be substituted, smuggled, whatever given the need. Industry mostly won’t care and CN government can pour in more money to compensate.
Semiconductor companies won’t feel rare earth embargo
Rare earths consumption in semiconductor is quite small and they can bid higher than everyone else to secure limited supply in case of embargo. Mainly this hurts EV makers and others, not semiconductor. This is similar to jet engine turbine manufacturers not caring about cobalt prices for turbine blades contrasting again to electric vehicles where cobalt prices and scarcity drove R&D aimed at using cheaper materials in batteries.
Retaliation from USA by restricting supplies of high purity quartz is also innefective.
Main quartz consummables in semiconductor industry are Cz crucibles for silicon boule growth.
Those might already be being recycled to recover most of the quartz but that’s relatively straightforward to do in a supply crunch.
Low mass compared to polysilicon feedstock used for growing wafers themselves <5%? So tapping supply chain purifying silicon is guaranteed to be enough to make crucibles.
High purity TCS or silane can be diverted from conversion to polysilicon for making wafers to instead be made into fumed silica. This is already done for higher purity fused quartz parts like photomask substrates. Process equipment is easy to make and can be rushed in a supply crunch.
There’s also facilities that grow Quartz crystals for oscillators. Not sure about tonnage but growth is surface area limited. Making sand instead of larger crystals would perhaps 10x deposition rate and drop cycle time which is currently a few months to grow larger crystals down to weeks.
There’s limited supplies in friendly countries (Russia) and domestically.
Free market would find whatever works to get silica meeting purity standards. Easy for crucible manufacturers to test purity.
Not something that halts production, definitely an annoyance.
Relevant Claude chat.
https://claude.ai/share/fa3c6de1-bdfb-4974-8e52-1324da3ae399