The only place where the world's semiconductor industry depends

Appalachian and Spruce Pine – this land is not a rich place, the downtown area only has a train station, a few rows of two-story brick houses, and a long-closed movie theater. However, the surrounding mountains are rich in desirable minerals, some valuable for industrial uses, especially quartz.

However, unlike any other quartz on earth, Spruce Pine has the purest natural quartz. This extremely superior deposition of silicon dioxide particles plays an important role in the production of silicon used to make semiconductor chips.

“There is a valuable industry here,” said Glover, a retired geologist who spent decades hunting for valuable minerals in the hillsides and lowlands of the Appalachian and Spruce Pine ranges. billions of dollars,” Glover said with a hearty laugh Wired. “You wouldn't know it by driving through here and you'd probably never know it.”

In the 21st century, sand has become more important than ever, especially in the semiconductor sector. Most of the world's sand is composed of quartz, a form of silicon dioxide, also known as silica. High-purity silicon dioxide particles are an essential raw material for the production of computer chips, fiber optic cables and other types of high-tech hardware. The amount of quartz used for these products is very small compared to the mountains of quartz used to improve concrete or soil. But its impact is immeasurable in the digital age.

Purifying pure quartz is very difficult, but Spruce Pine is blessed with an extremely large quartz mine and is considered the purest in the world. It is the result of a unique geological history, when about 380 million years ago, geological movements between the African continent and the Americas created friction with temperatures exceeding 2.000 degrees Celsius, causing melting. layers of rock, called pegmatite. 100 years later, this layer of molten rock buried deep underground cooled and crystallized. Through geological activities, they began to rise to the surface.

For many years, local people dug up pegmatite, crushed it with hand tools or primitive machines, separated feldspar and mica for use, and quartz was considered "trash", only suitable for making construction sand. build or throw away. However, in the mid-1950s, thousands of miles away in North Carolina, a group of engineers in California began researching pure quartz for semiconductors.

At that time, the transistor market was heating up rapidly. Texas Instruments, Motorola, and other companies began racing to create smaller and more efficient transistors for use in computers. Some of the substances found in transistors are germanium and silicon.

The breakthrough came in 1959, when Robert Noyce and his colleagues at Fairchild Semiconductor figured out how to cram multiple transistors into a piece of high-purity silicon the size of a fingernail. NASA chose Fairchild's microchips for use in space conquest programs, and the company's chip sales have also increased rapidly since then.

Creating those chips is an extremely complicated process. They essentially require pure silicon, because at the slightest impurity, everything breaks down. Finding silicon is easy because it is one of the most abundant elements on Earth. However, they require a lot of extraction steps. Using pure quartz will help reduce time and costs significantly.

Normally, sand will be heated in an electric furnace at high temperatures to create a chemical reaction that separates most of the oxygen, leaving 99% pure silicon. However, that is not enough. Silicon for solar panels must be 99,999999% pure, and computer chips are even stricter, 99,99999999999%. But with Spruce Pine quartz, the purity can reach 99,998%, even 99,9992% - a factor that helps significantly reduce the cost of separating impurities.

But even if there is pure quartz, not everyone can purify pure silicon. “The modern economy is located on a single road in Spruce Pine, which leads to the facility of Sibelco North America, a company that mines and refines ultra-high purity quartz,” said Professor Ethan Mollick, an AI and semiconductor research expert at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, told Tom's Hardware.

On the website, Sibelco also claims to be "the only supplier of quartz, for refining silicon wafers in chip production". However, the company's existence is not as well known as TSMC, Intel, ASML or Samsung in the semiconductor field.

Some experts assess that Sibelco's uniqueness is demonstrated through the fact that the fused quartz produced by the company provides "excellent" optical, mechanical and thermal properties for the production of semiconductors and photocells. electricity in solar cells as well as fiber optics in telecommunications cables.

According to Mollick, the importance of Sibelco in particular and Spruce Pine in general is huge. Quoting a passage from Conway's book The Material World and published on X on March 24, he said that there would be "the end of the computer chip manufacturing process" if something bad happened at Spruce. Pine or sky above it.

“Regardless of the reason, any sudden shutdown or disruption in quartz mining operations at Spruce Pine could cause a 'quite catastrophic' incident that could drag down the chip manufacturing sector significantly year,” Mollick added.

Bao Lam