Step 1: Put the helium in a blimp Step 2: Fly around the straight and over to Taiwan Step 3: Pump it into the chip factory There you go, solved it.
How do you get the blimp back?
Fold it up and ship it.
Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
321–330 of 675 posts
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#322Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big problem is purity. Fabs use grade 5 and 6 helium where contaminants are 1-10 parts per billion. The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized and any time the helium goes through a process it picks up so much contamination that recycling it would require the entire purifying and quality control infrastructure for pressure or temperature swing adsorption. Some fabs are starting to reuse heliu…
Now I'm imagining a procedural cop show where they bust an illegal helium dealer, and one of the cops takes a huff to gauge what they're dealing with, and then squeaks out "that's the good stuff".
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article I thought the helium was used mostly for cooling (where I imagine the purity wouldn't be that important) But what other processes do the fabs use the helium for then?
It is used a lot for cooling but in many systems its used without a classical heat exchangers where the helium is isolated from the workpiece. Helium is pumped beneath the wafer to keep it cool so any impurities can leak through the chuck seal into the chamber above and disrupt the process. It’s also very precisely controlled so impurities change the uniformity of the thermal conductivity of the gas, creating hot spo…
Thanks a lot for the info. Yeah, it makes sense that if you need pure helium anyway, you probably wouldn't create an entire second supply chain for impure helium.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#325I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.
Over the last two years I bought 2 4TB SSDs, 64GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM and 4 14TB HDDs.
I couldn't justify buying any of them today.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#326It is not just oil and helium supply chains, it is nitrogen fertilizers also, and in a season when they are needed the most: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nitrogen-ammonia-a...
Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart
They released a statement clarifying that they’re running the Qatalum smelter at reduced capacity, not shutting it down.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you like to offer a rebuttal more well reasoned and thought out than "nuh-uh"? You have the entire collected knowledge of mankind at your fingertips. You could do 30 seconds of research and find an answer better than "I don't think that sounds right".
What is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. (The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong : "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Anything can be asserted without evidence! It's only when something actually has been , in a given context, that dismissing it is -- in the same context --…
True but you can provide evidence to increase the quality of your claim.
Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#328Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
#329It is not just oil and helium supply chains, it is nitrogen fertilizers also, and in a season when they are needed the most: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nitrogen-ammonia-a...
Aluminum too, Qatar shutdown a smelting plant which take a year to restart
Why does it take so long?