Jul 13 2005
Hitachi Chemical Co will invest approximately 800 million yen to build a new clean room as an extension to its Yamazaki Works (in Hitachi-shi, Ibaraki), where evaluation equipment including polishing machines to be used for 300mm wafer based semiconductors will be installed to enhance the company’s Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP) slurry research and development efforts. The facility is scheduled for completion in December 2005.
CMP is a process for polishing and smoothing uneven waste substances (silicon oxide layers, interlayer dielectric materials or metal coating for wiring) on the wafer surface generated in the element isolation and circuit-forming processes for semiconductors. The company has won an increasing market share for its CMP slurry products, which are used as a polishing solution in the above process. Currently, it has an overall market share of approximately 15% (world’s second largest); especially in the most advanced cerium oxide (CeO2) slurry for STI market, it holds a share as high as approximately 60%, while it also has a high share of approximately 30% with slurries for copper wiring applications.
Semiconductor manufacturers are in a rapid shift toward producing 300mm wafers which yield approximately 2.25 times more chips per wafer compared to the currently prevalent 200mm wafers, thus largely contributing to productivity improvement as well as cost reduction.
Since the start of the CMP slurry business, we have aggressively installed evaluation equipment in order to enhance our capability for running the CMP processes in a manner similar to those of our customers for a more competitive edge. Our achievement to date in CMP development for 300mm wafers and increased sales has been based on effective utilization of the facilities and evaluation technology of the CASMAT (Consortium for Advanced Semiconductor Materials and Related Technologies) established in April 2003 under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
With the industry’s 300mm wafer production lines expected to become broadly operational in earnest, we are preparing ourselves to be ready to continuously provide enhanced technical services related to CMP slurries by installing such new evaluation equipment, including 300mm wafer polishing machines. The investment will improve the test and evaluation efficiency and enable us to promptly and widely respond to the diversity of customer needs by running customer-witnessed demonstrations and providing technical data for customers to review.
Along with the CMP slurry product line, we have selected 10 Key Growth Products as a means to concentrate our managerial resources to achieve continual growth in both sales and profits. The addition of the 300mm wafer polishing machines along with the other CMP quality evaluation equipment will help us accelerate the development of CMP slurries for processes involving design rules of 65-nm node and beyond. By further strengthening our sales efforts, we aim to achieve annual CMP slurry sales of 10 billion yen in fiscal 2007.
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