Chinese high-purity quartz manufacturer Jiangsu Pacific Quartz said its products have been qualified by one of the leading domestic DRAM memory manufacturers.
Analyst TP Huanghost of the China Tech Talk podcast, believes that we are talking about CXMT, China’s largest RAM manufacturer.
These are quartz components made from the company’s own purified sand and intended for 300mm wafer processing lines. This means that the supply chain is built almost entirely domestically, from the extraction and refining of raw materials to the chimneys reaching the memory plant.
Pacific Quartz has been working with foreign equipment suppliers for many years. Since 2019-2020, the company has been shipping ultra-high purity consumables to Lam Research and Tokyo Electron, including low-temperature chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) diffusion tubes, wafer cartridges, quartz ingots, wafers and tubes.
For process equipment, quartz of the 4N5–5N class is usually sufficient, that is, with a SiO2 content of 99.995% to 99.999%. The products of the Chinese manufacturer fit into these requirements, which allowed it to gain a foothold in the supply chains of global lithographic and precipitation equipment vendors.
Special requirements are placed on furnace tubes that operate at high temperatures near silicon wafers. Here you need quartz of a class of approximately 5N with strict restrictions on electrically active and mobile impurities – such atoms are capable of migrating into hot silicon, changing the characteristics of transistors, creating defects and reducing the yield of usable crystals.
At the same time, the industry’s key bottleneck remains beyond the reach of Chinese suppliers. The silicon ingots from which the wafers are cut are grown in fused silica crucibles with a purity greater than 99.999% SiO2 and extremely tight tolerances for selected critical contaminants. Pacific Quartz components are applied after the plate is manufactured.
Raw materials of this level are mined in industrial quantities only in one place on the planet. We are talking about deposits in the Spruce Pine region in North Carolina, where Sibelco and The Quartz Corp. operate. The Russian Russian Quartz also produces small batches, but the scale of this production is not comparable.
The global semiconductor industry depends on one quartz factory in North Carolina.
That’s why a tiny town in Appalachia has become one of the most vulnerable points in the global semiconductor industry. Any prolonged shutdown of mining there could affect the production of silicon wafers around the world, and no alternative sources of quartz of comparable purity have yet been found.
Thus, China covers the need for consumables for wafer processing plants, but dependence on American raw materials for growing the ingots themselves remains. Local manufacturers have yet to reach the 9N–11N purity level required for crucibles.
