There’s a small town in the mountains of North Carolina that the entire global tech industry quietly depends on. If it shut down tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to manufacture advanced semiconductors. Not slower. Not more expensive. Just gone.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9V4jNTLGus
**https://300.ya.ru/v_D0cxVuAB
таймкоды
00:00:00 Монополия США на важный материал
- США имеют монополию на важный материал, найденный только в одном месте на поверхности Земли.
- Распространение сверхчистой формы этого вещества могло бы отбросить мир на 25 лет назад.
- Производство материала охраняется как государственная тайна.
00:00:33 Состав песка и кремнезёма
- Песок состоит из кварца, который при раздавливании превращается в кремнезём.
- Кремнезём — основной ингредиент бетона и основа нашего мира.
00:01:02 Значение чистого кремнезёма
- Чистый кремнезём необходим для производства стекла, которое становится прозрачным при нагревании.
- Чем чище кремнезём, тем прозрачнее стекло.
00:01:43 Использование кремнезёма в военной технике
- Немецкие танкисты использовали кремнезём для улучшения видимости и точности стрельбы.
- Британские и американские танки имели более ограниченные возможности из-за использования двух перископов.
00:02:25 Захват месторождения кремнезёма Фонтен Блю
- Германия захватила крупнейшее в мире месторождение кремнезёма Фонтен Блю.
- Фонтен Блю был ключевым источником кремнезёма для британской стекольной промышленности.
00:02:51 Развитие производства кремнезёма союзниками
- Союзники разработали новые месторождения кремнезёма в США и Шотландии.
- К середине войны союзники догнали Германию по производству стекла.
00:03:30 Роль кремнезёма из Спрюс-Пайн
- Кремнезём из Спрюс-Пайн необходим для производства передовых полупроводников.
- Без этого материала невозможно производить чипы для телефонов, ноутбуков и серверов.
00:04:19 Процесс производства кремния
- Кремний плавится при температуре 1300 °C и требует чистых тиглей из кварца.
- Тигли изготавливаются из кварца, добываемого из Спрюс-Пайн.
00:07:37 Искусство выращивания кремниевых слитков
- Процесс выращивания кремниевых слитков требует навыков и опыта мастеров-растениеводов.
- Мастера управляют температурой, газами и другими факторами для получения идеальных слитков.
00:08:32 Роль мастеров-растениеводов
- Мастера-растениеводы используют ощущения и десятилетия обучения для выращивания идеальных кремниевых слитков.
- Их навыки не считаются настоящей наукой, но являются важным элементом процесса производства.
00:08:51 Секреты производства
- Операторы полагаются на звук, запах или цвет, но даже мастера терпят неудачу в 20–30% случаев.
- Лопасти реактивных двигателей изготавливаются из кристалла никеля, выращенного молекула за молекулой.
- Процесс полировки объективов высшего класса известен немногим в Canon и Leica.
00:09:48 Формирование гор и кварца
- Горы вдоль восточного побережья США поднялись из-за столкновения Африки и Северной Америки.
- Расплавленная порода превратилась в кварц, добываемый в карьерах Спрюс-Пайн.
00:10:07 Уникальные условия формирования кварца
- Отсутствие воды в процессе формирования кварца обеспечивает его чистоту.
- Диоксид кремния выдерживался при высокой температуре в течение 100 миллионов лет.
- Медленное охлаждение превратило расплавленную породу в массивные кристаллы.
00:11:13 История полупроводников
- Полупроводник был изобретён в лаборатории Белла в Нью-Джерси.
- Intel усовершенствовала полупроводники, но Тайвань обошёл Intel в производстве чипов.
- Тайвань стал основным производителем чипов для Apple, NVIDIA, Google и Tesla.
00:11:56 Технологические различия и конкуренция
- Разница в чистоте кремния для солнечных панелей и кремниевых пластин: 99% против 119%.
- Китай выиграл в производстве солнечных панелей, используя дешёвую электроэнергию.
- Китай стремится повторить успех в производстве полупроводников.
00:12:16 Будущее полупроводников
- Независимо от страны, полупроводники останутся самым совершенным изобретением.
- Секрет производства 119% кремния остаётся секретом, привязанным к песку из гор в США.
In this video
Chapters
Transcript
Search transcript
Chapter 1: Intro
0:00
0 seconds
This is the one critical material the US has a monopoly on. Found in exactly one place on the Earth’s surface.
0:06
6 seconds
Stop the ultra pure form of this from flowing and the world would slip backwards in time. 25 years. Which is why you don’t hear much about it.
0:12
12 seconds
Why the secrecy around it How it’s made, how to use it, are guarded like state secrets To make a million iPhones you need 250 pounds of it.
0:20
20 seconds
Not a nice to have, not we’ll figure something else out if we can’t find it. Like Saudi Arabia’s oil. China’s rare earths. This is America’s ace in the hole.
0:28
28 seconds
Quartz. This video is sponsored by Zapier. More on them later. This is sand. This is sand.
Chapter 2: What is Silica?
0:35
35 seconds
This is also sand. This could be sand.
0:39
39 seconds
Aside from white tropical sand created by fish eating coral or volcanic sand from worn down lava, sand is quartz. Take this quartz crystal.
0:47
47 seconds
Crush it up. What comes out is what’s in these piles.
0:50
50 seconds
Zoom in to one of the grains of sand in one of these piles.
0:53
53 seconds
And you would see oxygen atoms sticking themselves to silicon atoms in a pyramid shape. Each pyramid tangled up with its neighbor.
0:59
59 seconds
The tangle becomes a crystal called silica. Silica being the main ingredient.
1:04
1 minute, 4 seconds
Concrete is quite literally the foundation of our world.
1:06
1 minute, 6 seconds
Concrete is not overly picky about the quality of its silica.
1:09
1 minute, 9 seconds
A little bit of iron or magnesium tangled up in the crystal. Mix it together with lime. Add some water poured in a mold. Let it cure and you have concrete.
1:16
1 minute, 16 seconds
But if you find yourself with pure silica, nothing else along for the ride.
1:20
1 minute, 20 seconds
You, my friend, have found something exceptionally rare.
1:23
1 minute, 23 seconds
Expect a knock on your door because humans discovered long ago.
1:27
1 minute, 27 seconds
If you apply enough heat to silica, it’ll turn into glass.
1:30
1 minute, 30 seconds
The more pure the silica, the clearer the glass.
1:33
1 minute, 33 seconds
Far more recently, we discovered that if you want pure silicon, yes, that’s silicon.
1:38
1 minute, 38 seconds
If you want silicon, pure silica is the first thing you must find.
Chapter 3: Finding Hyper Pure Quartz
1:43
1 minute, 43 seconds
The tank that fired first one two thirds of the time, making the need to be able to see from inside the tank critical with the field of view twice as wide as British or U.S. tanks.
1:51
1 minute, 51 seconds
The lens on German tank sites often let German tank gunner see target and fire at enemy tanks before any tanks, even knew they were there.
1:57
1 minute, 57 seconds
Made big enough so a range finding system could be printed onto an inner layer of the lens.
2:01
2 minutes, 1 second
Germans used just one site when attacking.
2:04
2 minutes, 4 seconds
Gunners could sit in one station and look through a lens mounted next to the barrel. The gun British and U.S.
2:09
2 minutes, 9 seconds
tanks used two one whole periscope for looking around and spotting enemies, another for aiming the gun at them, forcing the commander to look through one to gauge distance,
2:18
2 minutes, 18 seconds
then yelled to the gunner to aim and fire a one lens system that helped Germany steamrolled through France at the start of the war, and just six weeks after crossing the border,
2:27
2 minutes, 27 seconds
found themselves the captors of Paris and the world’s prized silica mine. Fontainebleau.
2:32
2 minutes, 32 seconds
Just 35 miles south, it was the purest silica the world had ever seen.
2:37
2 minutes, 37 seconds
Less pure silica and the larger, more high powered the lens, the more distortion there is as you move away from the center of it. Rifle scope. Submarine periscopes. Tank sights.
2:44
2 minutes, 44 seconds
Bomb sights. Radar tubes.
2:46
2 minutes, 46 seconds
Fontainebleau was the single mine the entire British glass industry relied on. Gone.
2:51
2 minutes, 51 seconds
So, working at breakneck pace, two inferior silicon deposits in the US and the now famous Lochaline in Scotland, which would end up producing silica purer than Fontainebleau
2:59
2 minutes, 59 seconds
were developed to feed the Allied war machine. Better late than never.
3:03
3 minutes, 3 seconds
By the midpoint of the war, the allies had managed to catch up to Germany in glass production, but it wasn’t until two years after the war that the hyper pure silica
3:10
3 minutes, 10 seconds
that powers the entire modern world was discovered.
3:13
3 minutes, 13 seconds
Despite 80 years of scouring the planet, nowhere else on Earth has come close to rivaling what comes out of Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
3:20
3 minutes, 20 seconds
Fontainebleau is 99.7% Lochaline 99.8%.
3:25
3 minutes, 25 seconds
Spruce Pine is a staggering 99.999% pure silica.
Chapter 4: The Connection Between Quartz and Silicon
3:30
3 minutes, 30 seconds
It is impossible to make leading edge semiconductors without the silica pulled out of Spruce Pine. Inside your phone. Your laptop. Weapons.
3:37
3 minutes, 37 seconds
Every server and every data center that powers AI, air semiconductors formed on little sections of pure silicon, called chips, because the little square they’re all built on is chipped off a much larger block.
3:47
3 minutes, 47 seconds
It is how that much larger block of silicon is made.
3:50
3 minutes, 50 seconds
That makes the quartz at Spruce Pine irreplaceable, truly irreplaceable.
3:55
3 minutes, 55 seconds
And that is not hyperbole, which I have to say, because it’s extremely rare to have a hypercritical global industry in the modern world rely on one little piece of land.
4:04
4 minutes, 4 seconds
This irreplaceable land is the choke point that could be used to determine which countries can make advanced chips and which can’t.
4:11
4 minutes, 11 seconds
This is why China can’t suddenly overtake the US chip industry.
4:14
4 minutes, 14 seconds
Why taking Taiwan does not guarantee China would suddenly be able to make high end chips, Because if the US stopped providing the quartz
4:22
4 minutes, 22 seconds
from Spruce Pine, Taiwan ceases to operate full stop.
4:26
4 minutes, 26 seconds
But where is this connection between quartz and silicon?
4:30
4 minutes, 30 seconds
This ultrapure quartz ultrapure silica is turned into silicon. Not quite actually.
4:35
4 minutes, 35 seconds
That is exactly what those who make silicon try to avoid.
4:39
4 minutes, 39 seconds
Pull apart your phone and inside you’ll see where the brain that powers your phone is.
4:43
4 minutes, 43 seconds
Inside of this casing, right here is an advanced semiconductor that, in a pristine state would look like this. Just three millimeters tall.
4:50
4 minutes, 50 seconds
A perfectly polished piece of pure silicon etched into it using a process that could be mistaken for magic are billions of tiny pathways.
4:57
4 minutes, 57 seconds
The width of each measured in atoms.
4:59
4 minutes, 59 seconds
We’re talking 40, maybe 50 atoms wide for each path.
5:02
5 minutes, 2 seconds
If a random iron or oxygen atom is baked into the silicon, when an attempt to create one of these pathways is made, the pathway will not be made.
5:09
5 minutes, 9 seconds
Fail to create just one of the paths and the whole thing must be thrown out.
5:14
5 minutes, 14 seconds
All right, so you know that tedious thing you do every day?
5:16
5 minutes, 16 seconds
Copying data between apps, sending the same follow up emails, updating spreadsheets manually? There’s a way to make all of that happen automatically. I have been using Zapier for over five years.
5:24
5 minutes, 24 seconds
It lets all of my apps talk to one another.
5:27
5 minutes, 27 seconds
When the editor at one of my companies updates one of our books, he uploads it to Google Drive.
5:31
5 minutes, 31 seconds
Zapier sees that happen, goes through the files, compresses them, changes the file name to what the publisher needs, and sends a message to slack when it’s done.
5:38
5 minutes, 38 seconds
It took about 30 minutes to build that and saves us 24 hours per year.
5:42
5 minutes, 42 seconds
You can just type into Zapier what you’re trying to build, and it will lay it all out for you.
5:46
5 minutes, 46 seconds
And just recently, I realized I could hook Zapier to my brokerage.
5:49
5 minutes, 49 seconds
So now every Sunday, it pulls all my positions and I send them to AI and ask you to highlight any upcoming events that might impact them,
5:57
5 minutes, 57 seconds
and then summarize any events that did impact them the week before. Format that to be a pretty email. Send it to myself. That took an hour.
6:04
6 minutes, 4 seconds
The possibilities are endless, and I actually find it fun to come up new ways to use it.
6:08
6 minutes, 8 seconds
You can start automating your most tedious tasks for free using my Zapier link. Bitly forward slash 4J7KR2. Also in the description.
6:16
6 minutes, 16 seconds
Free up your head space. Get the boring stuff to handle itself.
Chapter 5: How to Make Silicon
6:22
6 minutes, 22 seconds
To make a piece of silicon pure enough to power an iPhone.
6:24
6 minutes, 24 seconds
You must make sure that when silicon is melted down from its natural blocks and formed into a cylinder, chips can be sliced from the thing that’s holding the melted silicon doesn’t contaminate it.
6:34
6 minutes, 34 seconds
Silicon melts at 1300 degrees Celsius. 2400°F. It’s very hot.
6:39
6 minutes, 39 seconds
Just about anything that comes into contact with the pool of molten silicon will, at minimum, shed off little pieces of itself that mix with the melt.
6:46
6 minutes, 46 seconds
Each rod of pure silicon comes out of one of these, a crucible made entirely out of quartz that comes from Spruce Pine,
6:54
6 minutes, 54 seconds
the quartz that comes from Spruce Pine, and only the quartz from Spruce Pine must be used for every single one of these crucibles, because some of it will inevitably end up in the molten silicon.
7:04
7 minutes, 4 seconds
Boeing planes, iPhones, PlayStations, MRI machines they all require at least one advanced chip that’s been cut out of a silicon rod formed
7:11
7 minutes, 11 seconds
in a crucible made with quartz from Spruce Pine.
7:16
7 minutes, 16 seconds
This crucible is just 99.9% pure quartz, but just three inches wide were melting tin.
7:21
7 minutes, 21 seconds
I don’t have the equipment, skills, or insurance, so attempt Silicon.
7:24
7 minutes, 24 seconds
Crucibles used to make silicon stand 3 to 5ft tall.
7:26
7 minutes, 26 seconds
They’re 2 to 3ft across and can only be used one time.
7:30
7 minutes, 30 seconds
For every 1 million iPhones Apple sells, a crucible will be built, filled up with molten silicon and destroyed by the process.
7:37
7 minutes, 37 seconds
Each chip in them starts out as silicon blocks that are melted inside the crucible, created using a process so difficult to perfect,
7:44
7 minutes, 44 seconds
it’s not considered science, but black art, because you can’t just let the molten silicon cool and pull it out, can’t pour it into something else for fear of contamination.
7:53
7 minutes, 53 seconds
A Polish engineer named Czochralski discovered using melted tin just like this, that discovered using melted tin just like this, that if you dipped an object into the metal, pulled it out in just the right way,
8:01
8 minutes, 1 second
you could grow a metal cylinder, an atomically perfect metal cylinder that, in the case of silicon, can be sliced into circular disks half a millimeter thick.
8:11
8 minutes, 11 seconds
A tiny, perfectly structured seed crystals melted on the tip of a metal rod and then dipped down until it just touches the surface of the molten silicon.
8:19
8 minutes, 19 seconds
Pulled up at an excruciatingly slow pace.
8:22
8 minutes, 22 seconds
The rod rotates, the molten silicon clings to the seed, and as it cools, because it’s touching the perfect seed crystal arranges
8:29
8 minutes, 29 seconds
its atoms in that exact same perfect pattern performed by people known as master growers.
8:35
8 minutes, 35 seconds
How fast to spin and pull, how to manage the temperature, the gases surrounding it, everything that allows a perfect silicon ingot to be grown is not considered a true science.
8:45
8 minutes, 45 seconds
There is no manual, just a feel.
8:47
8 minutes, 47 seconds
Learn through decades of apprenticeship to masters of the craft.
8:51
8 minutes, 51 seconds
Can’t patent it because you’d have to reveal how to do it.
8:54
8 minutes, 54 seconds
The operators rely on sound, smell, or color.
8:57
8 minutes, 57 seconds
Even the masters fail 20 to 30% of the time despite perfect settings.
9:02
9 minutes, 2 seconds
These are the traits of a black art, like how to make the blades inside every jet engine grown from a single nickle crystal into one giant crystal molecule
9:10
9 minutes, 10 seconds
by molecule, using what’s called the pigtail selector is known to a select few at GE, Pratt and Whitney and Rolls-Royce, or the handful of people at Cannon
9:17
9 minutes, 17 seconds
And Leica who know how to polish the highest end lenses used in cinematic cameras or semiconductor equipment. The Takumi technique.
9:24
9 minutes, 24 seconds
Nobody has cracked the alchemy of 1623.
9:28
9 minutes, 28 seconds
That’s let Zildjian for 400 years make the world’s best symbols, using ingredients that every metallurgist will tell you should produce metal
9:35
9 minutes, 35 seconds
so brittle it shatters when struck by a drumstick.
9:38
9 minutes, 38 seconds
80% copper, 20% tin with traces of silver.
9:42
9 minutes, 42 seconds
The process is only known by the CEO, delegating it out in parts to prevent anyone from knowing the whole secret.
Chapter 6: Spruce Pine Was a Freak Accident
9:48
9 minutes, 48 seconds
The mountains that run down the east coast of the US used to be taller than the Himalayas, violently pushed to the sky when Africa smashed into North America, forming one giant supercontinent, Pangea.
9:58
9 minutes, 58 seconds
Friction along the line impact created incredible temperatures that melted rock 15 miles beneath the surface.
10:03
10 minutes, 3 seconds
Molten rock that would become the courts pulled from the corridors of Spruce Pine.
10:07
10 minutes, 7 seconds
Call it a freak accident like the asteroid that smashed into South Africa, creating a small area that’s produced a quarter of the world’s gold. But the freak in this accident wasn’t the impact.
10:17
10 minutes, 17 seconds
It was the complete and total absence of water carrying things with it like a bus.
10:20
10 minutes, 20 seconds
Water drops molecules here and there that pollute the purity of quartz.
10:24
10 minutes, 24 seconds
Zero water, zero impurities with zero impurities.
10:27
10 minutes, 27 seconds
The molten silicon dioxide was left to cook at high temperature for 100 million years.
10:31
10 minutes, 31 seconds
Very, very, very slowly being pushed towards the surface as the African continent pulled away from North America, letting the mountains shrink to where they are today.
10:41
10 minutes, 41 seconds
A fifth of their original height. Cool the molten rock quickly and would have turned into tiny, messy crystals.
10:46
10 minutes, 46 seconds
But the 100 million year timer attached to this science experiment formed them into massive, organized crystals mined out of the ground by two very secretive companies
10:55
10 minutes, 55 seconds
who no doubt would prefer this video to not be made visible in satellite imagery.
11:00
11 minutes
You can see bright white veins of quartz trucks mingling about behind a 25ft high wall, patrolled as though an enemy is bound to arrive any moment,
11:07
11 minutes, 7 seconds
surrounded by nothing but a very small town, trees and hills 500 miles away, the semiconductor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Chapter 7: Taiwan, China, and the Technology Crown
11:17
11 minutes, 17 seconds
30 years later, across the country, Intel perfected it, crowning themselves King of technology.
11:22
11 minutes, 22 seconds
Japan sliced off the memory chip part of Intel’s business in the 90s.
11:26
11 minutes, 26 seconds
Two decades later, Taiwan Semiconductor sliced off the cutting edge CPU chips after passing Intel on who could make the most complex chips
11:33
11 minutes, 33 seconds
Apple, Nvidia, Google, Tesla anyone on the cutting edge of technology that needs the frontier of capability no longer look to Intel for elite chips.
11:41
11 minutes, 41 seconds
They looked to Taiwan.
11:42
11 minutes, 42 seconds
Taiwan now, with the crown firmly on, looks across the Taiwan Strait with a new and profound understanding of the famous words Intel’s CEO, used to describe the chip business.
11:52
11 minutes, 52 seconds
Only the paranoid survive.
11:56
11 minutes, 56 seconds
This is the difference between the purity needed for solar panels and silicon wafers. Nine nines versus 11 nines.
12:02
12 minutes, 2 seconds
Those two nines are a major part of the moat between the US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan on one side, China on the other. There is no black art in nine nine silicon.
12:11
12 minutes, 11 seconds
It is a science limited only by how much electricity you’re willing to spend to turn silicon gas into crystals.
12:16
12 minutes, 16 seconds
China won the solar panel wars by deciding it would spend as much electricity as needed, feeding its solar industry free or nearly free electricity
12:23
12 minutes, 23 seconds
so they could make the tiles of nine nine silicon that cover every solar panel cheap enough to undercut rival companies, push the price down low enough, and everyone else will go out of business.
12:33
12 minutes, 33 seconds
It worked and loathed to be beholden to the current kings of silicon. It is a play.
12:37
12 minutes, 37 seconds
China is without question intent on running again for semiconductors.
12:41
12 minutes, 41 seconds
Once it’s figured out The black heart of 11 nine silicon stated by officials outlined in plans. This is no secret.
12:47
12 minutes, 47 seconds
But in a twist of fate from 380 million years ago, regardless of who or what country wears the semiconductor crown,
12:55
12 minutes, 55 seconds
the most advanced piece of engineering humans have ever pulled off will, unless a miracle happens, always be tied to sand pulled out of the mountains around a small town in the United States.
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