As far as I know there are several other companies selling quartz as pure as Spruce Pine, they’re just more expensive because Spruce Pine has an old and well developed industry. This is an opportunity for other vendors to invest in their processes enough to take the market while Quartz Corp, et al are rebuilding.
Possibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
We can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it.
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
"The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a single quartz factory in North Carolina"
(130 points 6 months ago | 97 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248
As far as I know there are several other companies selling quartz as pure as Spruce Pine, they’re just more expensive because Spruce Pine has an old and well developed industry. This is an opportunity for other vendors to invest in their processes enough to take the market while Quartz Corp, et al are rebuilding.
Hereus Conamic and WACKER Chemie come to mind
Possibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
We can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it.
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.