Sorry I missed one word - should have said "purify it to make wafer grade silicon"As I read it, the quartz isn't used to extract and refine silicon, rather it is to make crucibles in which to melt silicon for making the 30cm "rods", which are in turn zone refined and then sliced into wafers. Note that the article says that such crucibles need to be replaced every 2 or 3 weeks.I think the press are overdoing this. Yes the quartz from this area is used because it's the purest available in the world, but it still has to be purified many thousands of times more to make the ingots. Other sources of quartz can be used, and indeed already are for solar cells. So the material is available elsewhere, it will just need more energy to purify it to wafer grade silicon. Also it takes months to make an ingot so the producers will already have a lot of work in progress. So prices may rise but there shouldn't be major shortages.
The stuff from NC is used to make the crucibles, but the inner 'bubble free' layer is purified to 99.997% first. But the bubble free inner layer of the crucible dissolves into the melt and so must be retouched after each usage. This can be done using purified quartz from NC, or from other sources after extra processing.
Mono-crystaline solar cells have become popular in recent years but the boules are all made in China using other silica glass sources for the crucibles. These don't have to be same purity as for 300mm top grade semiconductor wafers, but could be processed to be so.
Statistics: Posted by MikeDB — Fri Oct 04, 2024 11:05 pm