I broke my hand in 1990 after a freak^ motorcycle accident, and required two surgeries to repair it, pins and everything. For the second surgery, they had to wake me up so I could repeatedly flex a tendon they were cutting loose after it had adhered after first surgery. Was pretty cool seeing my exposed tendon like that … though blurry because they didn’t give me my glasses. The PT was long and tough, but I got back 98% ROM in that hand.
My wife started the first part of PT yesterday (doc showed her how to do it) to slowly rotate the arm up to keep the shoulder joint moving. That part hurts the most at this point.
^ freak in that it didn’t occur while riding, it happened just after stopping. unluckily on some loose gravel, so it slid a bit and in falling, I put out my hand and fell on it badly. What a mess, as I had riding gloves on … with pieces of bone sticking out through the perforations in the riding gloves!
I was just wondering about the neon problem. How long would it take the U.S. to develop its own neon industry? I understand that right now it’s a byproduct of the steel industry, which we don’t have much of, but I’m sure it could be extracted without that. Does anyone know offhand if anyone is moving this way?
Are we sure this “problem” is real, not just another hysteria campaign, to promote overbuying, which would then make the “problem” real. I can’t help but remember walking down a fully stocked toilet paper aisle at the store in early March, 2020, and picking up a 9 roll package. Two weeks later, the media started screaming “TOILET PAPER SHORTAGE!!!”, and store aisles were immediately stripped clean.
I do not know the US progress on this front. We see it coming but it takes two years to setup the processing plants, it takes two processes.
We do produce enough steel for this. The issue is how much Neon is produced. Meaning Mariupol, Ukraine specialized in this. Flattened. It takes a larger production of Neon to make it better quality and more economical. I expect we will take over this industry. But sometime into 2024.
Meanwhile scuttlebutt GM is going analog. As are other companies.
Could someone please explain the apparent conflict between this article’s contention of a chip “shortage” due to restricted neon supply, vs the article from the WSJ that Wendy posted, about a chip “glut”?
Here is how I understand it.
The potential neon shortage is/was real because 70% of neon is used for chip making lasers.
But neon is available everywhere in the air, but the lasers need 99.999% purity.
Ukraine (used to) produce about 50% of the world supplies, basically because they could efficiently do it, partially as a by product of making fertilizer for their wheat crops.
But there is (was?) several months of supply in the pipelines and other neon producers have probably increased production and even TSMC is building their own production of neon.
The chip glut is real because demand is generally lower for all the products people bought during lockdowns and don’t need replacements for yet…and all the PC makers and car makers over ordered during the pandemic and have plenty of inventory.
I think it is 70 or 74% of the neon came from Ukraine. It is not that easy to make up…yet…
The chip glut is in certain segments but the newer chip technology comes in early in 2023 at higher prices. So as not to cannibalize the new tech the old tech is being blown out with Christmas sales.
The glut has led to another shortage? Not yet but in some ways yes. The semi industry is feast or famine. When the feast happens the famine starts and visa versa because production ebbs and flows. As soon as you say glut it is if you are going to say shortage next.
Neon is produced from air in cryogenicair-separation plants. A gas-phase mixture mainly of nitrogen, neon, and helium is withdrawn from the main condenser at the top of the high-pressure air-separation column and fed to the bottom of a side column for rectification of the neon.[42] It can then be further purified from helium.
About 70% of global neon supply is produced in Ukraine[43] as a by-product of steel production in Russia.[44] As of 2020, the company Iceblick, with plants in Odessa and Moscow, supplies 65 per cent of the world’s production of neon, as well as 15% of the krypton and xenon.[45][46]
2022 shortage
Global neon prices jumped by about 600% after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea,[47] spurring some chip manufacturers to start shifting away from Russian and Ukrainian suppliers[48] and toward suppliers in China.[46] The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine also shut down two companies in Ukraine: LLC «Cryoin engineering» (Ukrainian: ТОВ «Кріоін Інжинірінг») and LLC «Inhaz» (Ukrainian: ТОВ «ІНГАЗ») located in Odessa and Mariupol respectively; that produced about half of the global supply.[47][49] The closure was predicted to likely exacerbate COVID-19 chip shortage,[46][45] which may further shift neon production to China.[48]
China’s production of gasses used for electronic production grew 23% year-on-year in 2021, reaching a market size of RMB 21.6 billion. 62% of China’s electronic gas is used to produce semiconductors, of which 43% are used in integrated circuits, and the rest goes to make photovoltaic and LED circuits, according to Yidu Data.
The country’s electronic gas market is also highly concentrated and controlled by foreign companies, with the top five firms taking an 85% share of the entire market in 2020. They are US-based Airproducts, US-based Praxair, France-based Airliquide, Japan-based Taiyo Nippon Sanso, and German-based Linde.
There are four main electronic gas producers in China: Huate Gas, Jinhong Gas, Nata Opto-electronic Material, and Yoke Technology. Huate Gas provides neon to ASML, the global lithography giant from the Netherlands. Jinhong Gas is capable of producing Xenon, as noted on its official website. Jinhong will start supplying electronic gas to China’s top chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation in April. However, these four companies only accounted for a tiny fraction of the market share, accounting for only 6.27% of China’s total special gas supply. Special gas is a broader category that includes electronic gas, which includes rare gas.
In addition, Kaimeite Gasses, a neon gas supplier based in the central Chinese province of Hunan, announced last week that they are in talks with ASML and expediting the process.