Announcement • Sep 05

Homerun Resources Inc Expands Pathway To High-Purity Feedstocks For Next-Generation Silicon And Silicon Carbide Integrated Photonic And Quantum Networks

Homerun Resources Inc. provided a comprehensive strategic update on the expansion of its high-purity silica feedstock pathway to support the next-generation Fused Silica, Silicon and Silicon Carbide (SiC) integrated photonics, advanced telecommunications, and quantum networking industries. Anchored by the company’s premier high-purity, low-iron silica resources in the Santa Maria Eterna (SME) Silica Valley in Belmonte, Bahia, Brazil, Homerun is establishing itself as a vertically integrated non-China feedstock supplier for mission-critical clean energy and deep-tech semiconductor value chains in the Americas. The company has successfully worked in partnership with the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) in California, USA, to process the high-purity SME silica sand into fused silica, silicon and silicon carbide suitable for semiconductor feedstocks and substrates. The research group at UC Davis has created a patent-pending laser processing solution for the purification of silica sand to plus 4N purity (+99.99%) and thus provide an excellent USA based supply chain of quartz to the rapidly growing semiconductor industry. The process utilizes high-purity silica sand sourced from Homerun’s SME resources in Brazil as the key raw material. This silica sand undergoes a pre-treatment process to ensure particle uniformity and homogeneity. Subsequently, the material is subjected to irradiation using a pulsed laser system. The methodology is entirely devoid of chemical inputs, highlighting its potential as an environmentally sustainable protocol within the silica value chain. With its promising scalability, this innovative approach holds the potential to significantly contribute to the self-reliance of the USA in high purity silica production for the silicon and silicon carbide semiconductor and photonic device industries. Homerun’s focus on the Si and SiC value chains covers the entire refined continuum, converting base earth elements into semiconductor-grade substrates through four critical stages: Stage 1: Precursor Synthesis. The production cycle begins with high-temperature carbochlorination. Ground, dry silica (as provided from the SME Silica Valley) is blended uniformly with graphite powder (provided from supply partnership with affiliated company, Bahia Graphite). This solid mixture is heated in a reactor to extreme temperatures of 800°C to 1100°C while passing dry chlorine gas. The reaction extracts silicon tetrachloride (SiCl4) as a gas, which is cooled, condensed into a liquid state, and meticulously purified via fractional distillation. Through the Direct Process, methyl chloride (CH3Cl) gas is passed over heated elemental silicon over a copper catalyst at 300°C, and subsequent hydrolysis removes chlorine atoms to bridge elemental silicon into siloxanes, specifically Polydimethylsiloxane. Finally, waste siloxane undergoes thermal decomposition where intense heat breaks the silicon-carbon and silicon-oxygen bonds, yielding a highly concentrated, silicon- and carbon-rich solid residue that serves as the crucial precursor for high-temperature SiC synthesis. Stage 2: Advanced Thermal Consolidation & Synthesis. Synthesizing high-purity silicon carbide from precursors is historically an energy-intensive, multi-day process. Homerun’s strategic roadmap leverages advanced thermal consolidation techniques (co-developed with UC Davis) that achieve synthesis in milliseconds to minutes with drastically lower energy per batch: Flash Joule Heating (FJH): A high-intensity thermal processing technique. Extremely rapid, high-voltage electrical discharges induce temperature spikes between 1,700°C and 2,200°C in milliseconds to seconds, forcing the immediate reduction of the silica matrix by internal carbon to synthesize high-purity SiC. Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS): By applying uniaxial pressure on graphite dies containing precursor powders at 1350°C to 1400°C, room-temperature on-off pulsing activates powder surfaces. This process consolidates the powders into fused silica glass or SiC disks and plates in minutes rather than hours. Directed Energy Deposition (DED): Utilizing direct laser melting of powders onto refractory ceramic surfaces, this method enables the rapid manufacturing of defined shapes and customized thicknesses of fused silica or SiC plates. Comparison of Traditional vs. FJH-SPS-DED Approaches: Metric Traditional Acheson/Induction FJH-SPS-DED Methods Duration Hours to days Milliseconds to seconds to Minutes(max) Energy Profile High total consumption Low energy per batch Product Output Large crystalline boules/powders Nanowires or fine powders and bulk disks or plates Wafer Readiness High (standard industry feedstock) Minimal post-processing if any. Stage 3: Single-Crystal Growth. The consolidated high-purity raw powder is treated at ultra-high temperatures exceeding 2,000°C in a Physical Vapor Transport (PVT) furnace. At these extreme temperatures, the raw unaligned poly-crystalline powder sublimes and re-condenses onto a seed crystal, forcing the chaotic precursor material into a flawless, single-crystal SiC ingot (boule). This grown boule undergoes precise X-ray orientation to map the crystal plane, followed by outer-diameter grinding and cropping into a standardized cylindrical shape. Stage 4: Precision Slicing & Atomic Finishing. The finished cylindrical boule is fed into high-precision multi-wire saws, which sheer the single-crystal ingot into thin, bare circular wafers measuring strictly under 1 mm in thickness. Rough-cut surfaces are flattened during lapping and grinding via industrial diamond abrasive slurries to eliminate saw marks and ensure strict parallelism. The final atomic finish is achieved through Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP), a dual mechanical and chemical polishing process that eradicates any remaining subsurface micro-defects, resulting in a mirror-like, atom-flat surface perfectly prepared for downstream epitaxy. Modern microelectronics are rapidly approaching their fundamental physical limits, prompting an industry-wide transition toward integrated photonics systems that manipulate photons instead of electrons to eliminate mass-related lag and electromagnetic interference. Silicon Carbide (specifically the 4H-SiC polytype) represents a major material paradigm shift. Its wide electronic bandgap completely eliminates two-photon absorption at telecommunication wavelengths, allowing for zero-degradation handling of high-power light. Additionally, 4H-SiC exhibits a high refractive index for compact device architectures, robust second-order and third-order optical non-linearities, and a thermal conductivity more than three times higher than silicon, completely preventing thermal distortion in high-power, space-based, or harsh telecommunication environments.

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