Jan 19 2007
Air Products is expanding tungsten hexafluoride (WF6) capacity at its electronic specialty material manufacturing facility in Hometown, Pa. This production addition is aligned with the company’s previously announced staged capacity plan. The new capacity will come onstream during the first half of this year. The expansion enables Air Products to produce 60% more WF6 for the semiconductor industry, in particular, memory chip manufacturers.
The new production unit will be an exact duplicate of Air Products’ existing production capabilities, including all nickel construction with automated process systems and a proprietary distillation process to remove impurities. There will be no change in raw material supply, and Air Products will continue to ship finished product in non-reactive nickel cylinders to prevent metallic impurities from contaminating the product.
The company will continue to ensure purity of supply by analyzing the gas in its state-of-the-art trace metals laboratory, which is also located at the Hometown site.
“We forecast solid growth for WF6 and feel that the timing is right to add more capacity, and further extend our leadership in fluorine chemistry,” said Corning Painter, vice president of Electronics for Air Products.
In the semiconductor industry, tungsten is used to construct vias which connect two layers of aluminum that are separated by a dielectric layer.