Essential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene

How do you really know where a Japanese or Korean vendor gets their stuff? “Trust me bro?”

Pluntonium? In semiconductor manufacturing? Tell me more please.

They melt the high-purity silicon in high-purity quartz crucibles to ensure a single crystal in the resulting product;

https://www.mmtc.co.jp/en/products/quartz.html

"Semiconductor devices, the foundation of the semiconductor industry, are manufactured by creating a fine electronic circuit on a silicon wafer made of single-crystal silicon.

Single-crystal silicon is made from high-purity polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon) and is grown by filling a quartz crucible with the silicon before heating and melting it in the extracting machine.

A high-purity quartz crucible is the optimal container to ensure the purity of molten silicon when manufacturing single-crystal silicon."

The crucible is used for holding melted silicon.

Any other material for the crucible except quartz would introduce impurities from whatever substance it is made.

Quartz is already silicon dioxide. It could introduce only silicon atoms, which do not matter at all, or oxygen atoms, which also do not matter much.

The only alternatives to quartz would be other silicon compounds that have a melting point higher than pure silicon, e.g. silicon nitride, but all of them are more expensive than quartz.

In the past, besides the crucibles for holding melted silicon, quartz was widely used for the walls of the ovens (typically having the form of a quartz tube) where silicon wafers were heated for various operations, e.g. for diffusion, and also for the wafer carriers on which the wafers were placed while inside the ovens (a.k.a. "boats").

These uses expose the material to lower temperatures than in the crucibles, because the wafers are solid, not melted.

Quartz is still used for these purposes, but in many cases it has been replaced with polycrystalline pure silicon, which can resist to these lower temperatures and it also cannot introduce any impurities. In comparison with quartz, polysilicon has the advantages of matched thermal expansion with the silicon wafers and of higher mechanical strength at high temperatures.

The article says the crucibles can often only be used once.

Toyota, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of JIT manufacturing, famously began stockpiling microchips after the Fukushima disaster disrupted their supply chains. It might not make sense to stockpile raw materials, but stockpiling things with comparatively low storage costs w.r.t. the item cost sometimes makes sense from a capitalist perspective. This assumes the company runs with a long-term perspective in mind, which often isn't the case in western companies that are publicly traded or owned/operated by investment firms. In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.

I don’t think that’s a fundamental inability; we just choose not to due to fashion in business thought.

But there’s nothing fundamentally that prevents pricing in risk of shortages to shareholders and appropriately stockpiling to mitigate that risk.

IDK, Berkshire Hathaway sure has a big stockpile of cash, and they're emblematic of capitalism. The cash in this model would be considered a "dead cost", as it's "wasted" by not being immediately invested in equities.

I agree with you, in general, that the short-term incentives of our system encourage "optimization" away from stockpiling inputs, and that this is a worrying problem.

But I find it instructive to focus on and give credit to the long-term thinkers who buck those trends – and who have historically profited and persisted by doing so, by the way.

It’s not the size that’s hard but the 99.9999% purity. The quartz from these mines is crushed, sorted for impurities, and fused/annealed into larger crystals before they’re ready for the semiconductor industry.

Well that's not nearly as neat looking as I naively expected a large sapphire to look like.

I suppose the usual gem color arises from the impurities?

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method is the actual big crystal growing process, to which this quartz is just the input. Effectively we repeatedly make a crystal with the impurities moved to the end, then saw off the end and discard it, then re-melt the crystal to make it even purer.

The single crystals of silicon that are made are cylinders with a diameter of 0.3 meter and a height probably of around 2 meter or even more.

The crucible must be bigger than that. The crucible is made from fused quartz glass. So the mine does not need to have big quartz crystals. They must be only pure. The mined crystals are melted together and processed like any glass, except that processing quartz glass is difficult, due to the very high melting point and the high viscosity of the melted quartz.

The melting of the pure quartz requires itself a crucible made from materials that resist to even higher temperatures, e.g. a crucible of molybdenum or even a crucible of iridium, for the lowest contamination with impurities.