Why is quartz glass an important part of semiconductor materials?

Quartz glass is known as the "crown" in glass materials. It is a kind of glass with SiO2 as a single component, which has super mechanical properties, thermal properties, optical properties and electrical properties. It plays an irreplaceable role in semiconductors, optical devices, optical communications, solar energy and other industries.

The upstream in the quartz glass industry chain is quartz sand and silicide (SiCl4, etc.). Quartz sand is an important raw material for the quartz glass material and product industry, and its price directly affects the production cost. According to the difference in quality and downstream market, the raw materials are roughly divided into ordinary quartz sand and high-purity quartz sand for electronic information fields.

The raw materials are crushed, washed, dried, hydrolyzed, synthesized, etc. to form quartz glass. Among them, opaque quartz glass with lower quality is mostly used to prepare quartz crucible, transparent quartz glass and synthetic quartz glass with higher quality, which are further processed to form quartz fiber, Quartz plates, quartz rods, quartz ingots and other quartz products.

The downstream of quartz glass is mainly concentrated in semiconductor, photovoltaic, optical fiber, electric light source, aerospace and other fields. Quartz glass is generally processed into ingots, cylinders, rods, tubes, etc. before further processing. For example, quartz ingots and cylinders are the materials of quartz flanges, diffusion tubes, and bell jars used in semiconductor process diffusion, oxidation, deposition, and etching processes. ; Synthetic quartz ingots can also be used as the main base material of photomask substrates; more than 95% of optical fiber preforms are high-purity quartz glass, and a large amount of quartz glass materials are also consumed in the production process.

The quartz glass market is a typical monopoly market. At present, the global high-end quartz glass market is mainly controlled by overseas leading companies such as Heraeus, Momentive, Tosoh, Unimin, and Kunxi. These overseas leading enterprises have a long history and have unique technological advantages. Each has its own fields and markets, high added value and strong competitiveness of products. Industrial scale advantage.

In recent years, with the growth of demand for quartz materials in high-tech industries such as electronic information and aerospace, the domestic quartz product industry has achieved substantial improvement in terms of process level and equipment manufacturing. The domestic quartz product industry is changing from an energy-intensive industry to a technology-based industry. Intensive, capital-intensive direction change.

In the semiconductor industry, high-purity, non-polluting, high-temperature resistant quartz glass materials and products are essential auxiliary materials. At present, semiconductor quartz is mainly divided into semiconductor devices, semiconductor quartz substrates and semiconductor quartz materials, and the market size accounts for 41%, 31% and 28% respectively. In 2018, the global semiconductor quartz market demand was 20.6 billion yuan.

In the future, the demand for my country's semiconductor industry will grow rapidly, especially in the fields of consumer electronics, automotive electronics, and lighting electronics. While the market scale is growing rapidly, the country also attaches great importance to the problem of insufficient semiconductor autonomy in my country. The "National Integrated Circuit Industry Development Promotion Outline" proposes to vigorously develop my country's semiconductor industry and increase the localization rate of key equipment and materials.

Therefore, it is of great significance to develop high-performance quartz glass materials and products, expand production capacity, improve equipment level and product quality, and promote the development of my country's quartz glass material industry and the sound development of my country's semiconductor industry.