Korea Zinc spent SEMICON West making a case that has little to do with wafers: that American fabs should clean them with acid refined in America. The Seoul-listed smelter said it held one-on-one meetings at the show with Micron, Intel and GlobalFoundries about supplying semiconductor-grade sulfuric acid locally.
The material is unglamorous and unforgiving. Fabs use it to strip contaminants from wafer surfaces, and trace impurities are enough to scrap a batch, so buyers demand six nines of purity and a supplier who can prove it stays there. Korea Zinc says it recovers sulfur dioxide from its own zinc and lead smelting and refines it above 99.9999 percent.
Its pitch leans on the fact that most of this acid is still made near the fabs’ older homes in Asia. Micron is building in Idaho and New York. Intel runs Arizona and Oregon plants and is constructing in Ohio. TSMC’s Arizona site was discussed through Sumitomo Chemical, which Korea Zinc already supplies.
Intel’s answer was the interesting one. According to the company’s account, Intel told Korea Zinc it would need to verify acid produced from smelting-derived feedstock and would review a purchase once sample tests come back, which is the standard way a fab says it is listening without committing.
Korea Zinc has put a name on its US plan, Project Crucible, and is trying to expand beyond acid into germanium, another material where China’s export controls have made buyers nervous. For a smelter, moving up the value chain into electronic grades is the obvious growth path. The qualification cycle, not the chemistry, is the hard part.
