The problem is high-quality hydrogen bromide, from the article.
"Critically, ICL’s hydrogen bromide gas production, including the semiconductor-grade output supplied to South Korean fabrication plants, is manufactured at the same Sodom facility where extraction occurs, meaning extraction and conversion infrastructure are co-located in the same vulnerable corridor."
The production facility is a real vulnerability but the shipping factor is overstated - total supply for silicone etching could be airlifted. It’ll be more expensive but not a crisis.
Given the nature of just how nasty bromine is, I imagine air freight would not be legal over any populated flight corridor. That'll make it impossible to fly into Korea.
I don't believe route limitation for dangerous goods is a thing. I looked on https://www.iata.org/en/publications/newsletters/iata-knowle...
Interestingly I asked both Claude and ChatGPT "does the Infectious Substances Shipping Regulations include anything about what routes for airfreight are allowed?" and it flagged it and wouldn't respond, although switching to Sonnet 4 allowed Claude to answer.
ChatGPT has gotten 'sensitive', almost unusable in last week. That seems like a simple question, and it refused. It's done same to me, on very simple generic questions. It somehow infers something much more nefarious, then refuses.
Given the importance of DRAM, I imagine they would get their own plane if required.
The issue isn't the plane. It's being allowed to fly over places where people live.
No better time than now to get into suborbital cargo freight business.
Boeing makes the minuteman 3, maybe now is a good time to invest.
Making it isn’t hard. The issue is that it’s such a low margin product that anyone spinning up a facility will not see any decent ROI. And local govt won’t allow competition because it risks collapsing their whole market if both producers fail at a the same time.
This is what govt is good for, in respects to ensuring materials supply continuity for their domestic markets
The article says it would be difficult to ramp up other production. What is your claim based on?
As far as day-to-day production goes, it’s not a terribly complicated process. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s not hard (in the grand scheme of this industry).
Anyways, with that out of the way:
Quote me where I talked about difficulty of bringup (layperson: “ramping up”) production.
(I’m assuming that that is the “claim” that you think I made that you are referring to. If it’s not, please enlighten me.)
Unless you can quote me, you’re just coming up with something in your head and arguing with me about it. In fact, in my post, I made some light allusions to the not-insubstantial cost of a bringup.
TFA is about high-purity bromine, not about ordinary bromine.
The purification processes for any of the substances used in the semiconductor industry are quite complicated and they are done in few places around the world. For many pure substances, major suppliers are located in Germany or Japan.
The substances with a semiconductor-grade purity are much more expensive than the ordinary substances. Being one thousand times more expensive is not unusual, which demonstrates the difficulty of the purification processes.