- Jiangsu Pacific Quartz secured approval to supply domestically refined, high-purity quartz for 300 mm DRAM memory chip fabrication lines in China.
- While China can now supply quartz components for chipmaking machinery, it cannot yet make the ultra-pure quartz crucibles needed to melt silicon and grow ingots.
- Because Chinese crucibles lack the required purity (up to 11N silicon standards), the country still relies heavily on overseas suppliers.
China is taking another step toward reducing its reliance on foreign suppliers for important semiconductor materials, this time targeting the high-purity quartz used in advanced chip manufacturing. Jiangsu Pacific Quartz has reportedly obtained certification for domestically produced quartz materials to be used in DRAM production on 300 mm wafers, marking another milestone in China’s efforts to localise its semiconductor supply chain.
The quartz used in many semiconductor production devices demands exceptionally high purity standards. Consumables for these machines typically vary from 4N5 to 5N, representing 99.995% to 99.999% SiO₂.
Jiangsu Pacific Quartz has already proven its ability to consistently meet this level of quality, prompting some of the world’s major semiconductor machinery suppliers to use its products.
The next stage was to complete the homologation procedure so a Chinese DRAM manufacturer could use material made from its own high-purity quartz on 300 mm wafer lines. This is especially important since it enables the development of a virtually domestic supply chain.
In other words, Pacific Quartz harvests and purifies its own quartz sand before converting it into material suitable for manufacturing quartz tubes, which it can then ship directly to a Chinese DRAM facility.
These tubes are also significantly more important than they would appear. During heat processes, they operate immediately near the silicon wafers, and any contamination can migrate to them, affecting transistor electrical characteristics, causing errors, and eventually lowering the factory’s production output. As a result, the certification shows that Chinese quartz meets the strict requirements for direct use in advanced memory manufacturing processes.
Despite these improvements, a fundamental difference remains between manufacturing quartz components for semiconductor equipment and fabricating the crucibles required to form silicon ingots. These ingots are then sliced into wafers. These crucibles contain molten silicon throughout crystal growth and require even more regulated quartz, generally reaching 99.999% SiO₂, with extremely tight limits on individual impurities.
This explains the constant reliance on a single US region: Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Sibelco and The Quartz Corp. operate in this region and can supply huge volumes of ultrapure quartz for these crucibles.
Russian Quartz LLC can also make this material, but in considerably lesser quantities. This is why Spruce Pine continues to hold a leading position in supplying one of the most crucial materials used in global semiconductor wafer production. China’s challenge is that Pacific Quartz still cannot make crucibles of the quality required to produce ingots for silicon wafers with purities ranging from 9N to 11N. As a result, while China has managed to nationalize a portion of the semiconductor and DRAM supply chain, it still relies on supplies for one of the first and most important phases of creating the wafer on which the chip will later bemaded.
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