The Chip Insider®– Hurricane Helene and the Great Quartz Shortage Threat

Last Friday, September 27th, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then cut a swath of destruction not seen since Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864. This time the scale of destruction was caught by the NOAA-20 satellite in full Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night band imagery where you see black-out conditions, in its 800-kilometer path… While this puts scale to the disaster, it does nothing to describe the magnitude of pain, death, and suffering of the people’s lives it has torn apart… Putting 800 km from an international perspective, Japan is a mere 240 km across, Korea at the DMZ only 193 km, and Taiwan only 145 km. The drive from Munich to Amsterdam is just over 800 km and only 668 km as a hurricane would fly. And that’s what it took to take out a critical part of semiconductor technology: High-Purity Quartz (HPQ) centered in one supply-chain hot spot: Spruce Pine…

Supply chain vulnerabilities are a never-ending concern for the semiconductor industry because we use so many materials – rare in abundance or location… The price of being a supply chain manager in semiconductors is never-ending vigilance. They do their jobs well, because … the worst did not have a material effect on annual sales growth… This is the first hurricane. The good news is there was plenty of time to plan… Things were looking much brighter at Spruce Pine this morning. I got news that employees at TQC and Sibelco and their contractors were “accounted for and safe…” early assessments indicate the damage to the plant and mines are …

What will speed the recovery is that the people of Spruce Pine are hardworking and proud of the role they play in the world.

Putting everything together, I don’t expect it to materially affect 2024’s semiconductor market. But Godspeed to the families that have been affected by this horrible disaster.

“History never repeats itself but it often rhymes.” — as Mark Twain is reputed to have said