China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced the move after the Washington expanded its list of Chinese companies subject to export controls on computer chip-making equipment, software and high-bandwidth memory chips. Such chips are needed for advanced applications.
The ratcheting up of trade restrictions comes as President-elect Donald Trump has been threatening to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China and other countries, potentially intensifyi
That was such a frustrating article. Basically no information on why those metals (minerals?) are needed to manufacture chips and then you get to the end and find out that the U.S. gets half of them from China (but doesn’t say where the other half comes from), and they just say that antimony is used in a wide range of products but not where it is also sourced from or how much is from China.
I assume this is not good news, but that was just not very helpful in explaining it.
Long story short, they’re silicon doping agents that change the properties of semiconductors. China produces like 90% of these rare earth elements.
Gallium for example is used in the new smaller USB power supplies marketed as GaN gallium nitride, in this case used instead of silicon due to the better thermals at high power and smaller physical size.
Seymour Cray was building a Gallium Arsenide CPU when he left Cray Research.
I recognize gallium at least as a dopant material (what transforms the pure sillicon, which is an isolator, in the the n-side or the p-side of a semiconductor junction, where gallium specifically is used in light emitting junctions such as in LEDs) and a quick search showed that antimony is also a dopant.
(For the curious, here’s the Wikipedia article)
As you might have noticed, even my short explanation of what a dopant is actually requires people to understand to an advanced level what semiconductors actually are made of, so I can see why an AP article which is targetting the average person wouldn’t go into that specific rabit hole of explaining stuff that requires more stuff to be explained which in turn requires even more stuff to be explained and so on.
Also, I would be surprised if there are more than a handful of journalists in the World with even the most basic understanding of how semi-conductors work.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA240992
Germanium, one of the most important of the advanced electronic materials, is used in semiconductor devices, fiber optic systems, and infrared sensors for ships, aircraft, missiles, tanks and anti-tank units. Because of its importance in these applications, germanium was added to the National Defense…
Can’t see more really.
Antimony is a strategic critical mineral that is used in all manner of military applications, including the manufacture of armor piercing bullets, night vision goggles, infrared sensors, precision optics, laser sighting, explosive formulations, hardened lead for bullets and shrapnel, ammunition primers, tracer ammunition, nuclear weapons and production, tritium production, flares, military clothing, and communication equipment.
Hope that helps.
My takeaway is that since MILITARY INTEREST is involved, these materials will be exempt from the tariff.
Who do you think pockets the tariff? It would just be the government passing money from one hand to the other.
This is China banning the export of it’s rare metals to the US. We’re not even going to notice it. We have these available to us from other sources and domestic mining.
It’s a free, unclassified, pdf from a .mil. Treat it like an academic study and scroll to the conclusion. The takeaway is that unless we’ve let something slide since 1989 we produce enough Germanium for our own use and could scale it up properly in a large war scenario. And a quick check shows the companies they mention either still in operation or sold off in a bankruptcy and still in operation.
I’m not American nor am I commenting on what China’s decision means.
I simply shared some info on what these are used for.
per Wikipedia: Gallium is mostly used in cell phone production and higher frequency lasers (eg blueray, UV)
Actions have consequences?!
We have those thing… raw. The reason China provides them to the rest of the world is not because they are the only source, it is because those things are highly toxic and China is the only one to look the other way from the environmental effects of processing them WHILE at the same time having a professional enough workforce to do the processing.
We have all the PlayStations in the world! That’s where gallium is dumped between the CPU and the cooler.
