One side of one mountain in North Carolina is the source of sand that goes into many of today's high tech solar panels and computer chips. Silica quartz from that Spruce Pine mountain region in North Carolina is the purest quartz form and the one source that goes into making silicon quartz tubing and crucibles consumed in making silicon wafers.
Momentive Performance Materials in Hebron, Ohio craves the stuff. The raw material goes through a high-tech manufacturing process in a clean room and high temperature environment.
It's easy to consider the low tech material--sand--tending to make the end product low-tech too. Just the opposite is true. The end product, though, is material essential to computing as we know it today.
Indeed. Manufacturing is high tech.
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