Our State-of-the-Art Research Center
Our customers have asked us about the development of new advanced specialty gases, including etchants and deposition precursor materials that are not currently available in the marketplace. In response, EFC Gases & Advanced Materials is addressing that demand in our state-of-the-art research and development facility in Hatfield, PA.
At our research center in Hatfield we are:
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- Conceptualizing new materials to address the industry’s most pressing application requirements.
- Synthesizing trial quantities of new candidate materials using traditional synthesis techniques and the latest advanced fluorination technologies.
- Scaling up optimized process chemistry and purification technologies to provide pilot and commercial quantities of unique new materials for the semiconductor industry.
- Developing robust analytical methods to detect and characterize chemical species and to verify product integrity down to the ppb level in most cases.
Our customers in the semiconductor industry demand materials of the highest purity and consistent quality, whether for established applications such as plasma etching and deposition or for next-generation processes like atomic layer etching (ALE) and atomic layer deposition (ALD). EFC Gases & Advanced Materials is at the forefront of supplying these critical materials.
At our Hatfield facility, EFC’s R&D team partners with leading academic institutions, combining their world-class capabilities with our industry expertise. Together, we are developing technology-driven solutions to address today’s most pressing challenges in semiconductor manufacturing.
Pilot Plant Facility for Chemical Development
Our Pilot Plant area for chemical development and scale up of advanced gases and precursors for the semiconductor industry opened in 2022. The pilot plant development area is equipped with several unit operations including a 5-gallon (20-L) high-pressure (3,000 psig) high-temperature (350 °C) CSTR, a 20-gallon (75-L) Hastelloy reactor, several Ni-alloy packed bed catalyst reactors, a spinning band distillation system (providing efficient fractionation of molecules with small differences in their boiling points), and supporting analytical instrumentation including gas-phase UV-VIS and FT-IR spectrometers and a GC-MS/TCD/FID. This equipment is rarely seen in a manufacturing environment and demonstrates EFC’s commitment to turning research into viable technologies for the semiconductor industry.
EFC’s R&D Center provides low-kg quantities of new molecules for advanced applications in semiconductor materials processing. The pilot plant now enables multi-kg scale synthesis and production of critical new materials, effectively bridging the gap between R&D discovery and commercial manufacturing.
This state-of-the-art capability strengthens EFC Gases & Advanced Materials’ role in supplying the commercial volumes of critical materials required by the semiconductor industry in the 21st century.
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New R&D Building At Our Hatfield Plant
We are currently building a new Research & Development center at our Hatfield Plant. Scheduled to open this year, the product development area will be equipped with many advanced capabilities, including a pilot scale high-pressure high-temperature reactor and a specialized spinning band distillation system.
