PPT Chemicals Drive $30 Million Olin Plant
By Sheila Galatowitsch
Mesa, AZ–A growing market demand for parts-per-trillion semiconductor process chemicals is behind the creation of a $30 million chemical manufacturing and distribution center in Mesa, AZ. Olin Electronic Materials completed construction this month on the 207,000 ft2 facility, which will initially house Olin Process Chemicals, a supplier of high purity acids and solvents to semiconductor manufacturers. Several other semiconductor-related Olin business units will relocate to the 32-acre site over the next few years. The site was selected because of its proximity to major semiconductor fabs in the region.
On six acres adjacent to the Mesa plant, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co. is building a $20 million facility to manufacture ultrapure hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) for sale by Olin. The H2O2, which previously was shipped from Japan, will be piped directly into the Olin facility to be bottled and distributed. Construction on this plant should be completed by the end of the year.
The new Olin facility has been designed to produce commercial volumes of parts-per-trillion (PPT) chemicals, the highest purity level currently available, as well as other high purity grade chemicals. It will increase Olin`s manufacturing capacity by 50 percent and replace operations in Chandler, AZ, and Nazareth, PA. Company officials say there is a growing need for PPT chemicals to support production of devices with circuit geometries in the 0.5 to 0.35 micron range, such products as microprocessors, DRAMs and ASICs.
“It`s really the memory market that is consuming the greatest amount of these PPT chemicals,” says electronic materials expert Dr. Daniel Rose of Rose Associates (Los Altos, CA). “We are entering a new generation of technology that will employ 0.25 to 0.35 line widths, and these are the products that will require the PPT purity levels.” Rose says that over the next three to four years as many as 40 fabs will be built each year that will require PPT chemicals.
Japan and Korea have been the principal users and manufacturers of these chemicals, which were first available about two years ago. “If you look at the total world of semiconductor chemicals and what percent is PPT, it is very small today, but it will grow to be a significant portion over the next few years,” Rose says. Olin is the second largest wet chemical supplier in the U.S. and fourth worldwide. Its PPT product line includes H2O2, ammonium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, isopropyl alcohol and hydrofluoric acid.
The electronic materials industry is able to produce these chemicals by refining manufacturing technologies, Rose says. In order to produce PPT-grade chemicals at the new site, Olin manufacturing personnel helped design the facility for the highest level of contamination control in every process–from raw materials coming into the plant to manufacturing, filling, packaging and storage. “From the time the dustcap is removed from the bottle when it enters the cleanroom, to the time the final cap is put on after filling, the product only sees a Class 1 environment with no opportunity for contamination from equipment,” says Keith A. Cardinal, Olin`s package development manager and part of the Olin design team.
The focus on cleanliness begins with the bottles and drums used to contain the chemicals. The company is actually manufacturing polyethylene bottles onsite in a 5,000 ft2 Class 100,000 cleanroom, with minienvironments ranging from Class 1,000 to Class 10 at the point of mold. Making these containers onsite is new for Olin and the industry, and it helps to eliminate contamination caused during shipment that might jeopardize chemical purity. And as part of Olin`s returnable drum program, emphasis is placed on isolating, prepping and cleaning returned drums before they enter the packaging lines.
The total manufacturing area is 55,000 ft2, which includes separate packaging lines for bottles and drums. A Class 1,000 cleanroom encloses these packaging areas–one 20 ¥ 82 ft line for bottles, and two lines for drums measuring 28 ¥ 29 ft, plus a gowning, shower and sampling area. Just over the filling section of the packaging lines, in an area measuring approximately 3 ¥ 50 ft where chemical meets open container, is a Class 1 minienvironment with ULPA filters. Olin borrowed this “1,000 to 1” concept from its semiconductor customers. Phoenix-based Hardison Downey was the site`s general contractor and Cleanroom Sciences, also of Phoenix, verified the integrity of the cleanroom design.
The facility features a one-way flow of raw materials, containers and finished goods. “Chemicals come directly from the raw materials warehouse or the process rooms to the packaging line, then into the storage warehouse. There`s no reversal. Everything moves forward,” says project manager Bill Matthews, formerly Olin`s director of manufacturing.
The flow begins with raw chemicals that are stored in Teflon-lined bulk tanks. Depending on the product, the chemicals may be processed or blended in special rooms, then routed through a series of filters that are mounted in a closed mezzanine above the filling section. The design provides for continuous flow and filtration throughout the filling process–the product never stops. Drop openings over the filling area represent a different product type, and each product has its own set of filling apparatus.
“The employees worked extensively on the filler to ensure that it would be capable of filling PPT-level chemistry,” Cardinal says. “For this level of purity there is no outsource supplier to go to. So knowing from our own experience what causes microcontamination, both from a particle and trace metal standpoint, we endeavored to design a piece of filling equipment for both the bottles and drums that would eliminate as many of the areas we have seen as problems in the past–things as simple as looking at how product flows through piping.”
After the chemicals are filled in either 2.5 liter or one-gallon bottles, or 5- to 55-gallon drums, the containers are capped and exit the minienvironment through an airlock. While still in the Class 1,000 cleanroom area, they are cased and stretch-wrapped, then moved into the finished goods warehouse, where they are segregated by product type.
The facility`s Class 10,000 analytical laboratory, which provides application development and support, is more than double the size of the previous lab. The new lab has a Class 1,000 sample prep area with four Class 100 laminar flow exhaust hoods. The dry lab conducts in-house analyticals with one ICP, two ICP mass spectrometers and a recently purchased high-resolution ICP mass spectrometer, which is used as a quality assurance tool to guarantee the purity of the PPT product line. Staffing has been increased threefold, and the new lab`s office area will be enclosed to help reduce contamination. It also features a viewing window to avoid bringing visitors into the lab.
The finished goods warehouse and distribution center, which opened late summer, has temperature controlled, self-contained areas such as an oxidizer room, cold and warm rooms, and a flammable room that were designed with in-rack sprinkler systems. It also has special features to accommodate just-in-time (JIT) delivery, including a computerized inventory lot locator system.
The JIT distribution capability will help support another Olin business unit, Olin Chemical Management Services (CMS), which provides onsite wet chemical management up to the point of use for semiconductor manufacturers. There are 13 Olin CMS employees working round-the-clock at the SGS Thomson Microelectronics fab in Phoenix, one of seven fabs using the services. “The larger fabs have a problem with the amount of chemistry they can have onsite. The just-in-time inventory at the Mesa facility allows us to have as many deliveries as we need a day to support this fab–and minimize the amount of chemistry we have on the job site,” says Olin service manager Ed Graham. n