I'm a pretty skeptical of the claim that it can't be replaced, rather than it just being only lightly incentivized to develop high throughput silica purifying techniques whilst the mine is active.
I'm more inclined to believe that something like this would get the kind of push needed to go to completion if the Spruce Pine material was suddenly out of the equation.
To what decimal place is it pure? Solar panels are pure to the ninth decimal place, while the silicon wafers that make up microchips are pure to the eleventh decimal place.
Always expect someone to do the impossible. Or for a similar pure quartz deposit to be discovered. What ASML pulled off with their most advanced photolithography machines was always deemed impossible for quite a while.
You are right, and EUV is fucking insane when you actually look up how it works (gonna post a video about it later, probably in a bigger post with more videos explaining how modern hardware is physically made).
There needs to be a motivation to find another quartz deposit, is my current belief. As the primary reason we even have Spruce Pine, and most of the North American quartz mines that aren't Spruce Pine is because the one in France became unavailable after the Nazis invaded
I'm a pretty skeptical of the claim that it can't be replaced, rather than it just being only lightly incentivized to develop high throughput silica purifying techniques whilst the mine is active.
I'm more inclined to believe that something like this would get the kind of push needed to go to completion if the Spruce Pine material was suddenly out of the equation.
To what decimal place is it pure? Solar panels are pure to the ninth decimal place, while the silicon wafers that make up microchips are pure to the eleventh decimal place.
Always expect someone to do the impossible. Or for a similar pure quartz deposit to be discovered. What ASML pulled off with their most advanced photolithography machines was always deemed impossible for quite a while.
You are right, and EUV is fucking insane when you actually look up how it works (gonna post a video about it later, probably in a bigger post with more videos explaining how modern hardware is physically made).
There needs to be a motivation to find another quartz deposit, is my current belief. As the primary reason we even have Spruce Pine, and most of the North American quartz mines that aren't Spruce Pine is because the one in France became unavailable after the Nazis invaded