Post-CMP cleaners are now flowing from a newly completed production building in Japan. The facility sits on the Oita Factory campus of Fujifilm Electronic Materials, the company’s core chip-materials business.
The cleaners remove particles, trace metals and organic residues after chemical-mechanical polishing while shielding metal surfaces. Demand is climbing fast as AI chips push miniaturization and 3D stacking, both of which put a premium on yield-critical cleaning steps.
Oita already produces the CMP slurries used for planarization, and the new building extends the site into the cleaners applied right after that step. Post-CMP chemistry has become one of the fastest-growing niches in semiconductor materials as chipmakers stack more layers in advanced logic and memory.
The company pointed to rapid growth in the chip market on the back of AI, 5G and IoT, with the most robust demand for the advanced silicon used in AI workloads. Solar panels on the new building’s roof will cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a broader shift to renewable energy at the factory.
