The focus of interest among the electronics-related industries for the last month was the short supply of gases, because the users and gas suppliers suffering the globally short supply of Ne, C4F6, WF6 and NF3 have been crying out with the voices of “Where can we get Ne?” “Disabled to test waste gas disposition equipment without C4F6,” “Our production line stopped due to no procurement of WF6” or “NF3 unavailable from abroad”. The trend is prevailing globally in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the US.

What is happening? It is quite simple from a phenomenal viewpoint that the production capacity does not catch up with the increasing demand, namely due to the imbalance of demand and supply. However, the cause varies. NF3 (Nitrogen Trifluoride) is used as a cleaning gas for plasma CVD chambers. The scale of its world market in 2014 was 16 thousand tons (as estimated by Gas Review). The consumption is incomparably large among the specialty gases like ammonia. In the segmental terms, LCD accounts for about 60% surpassing semiconductors. More growth of demand is expected this year as China has planned to establish new large-scaled LCP plants at nearly 10 locations.

On the other hand, NF3 producers have been suffering declined revenues on account of the extremely softened gas prices during these several years, which are inhibiting any further capital investments while the burden of large-scaled containers like the ISO module has also caused reluctance to expands facilities. All the more enlarged volume, the risks of capital investment may naturally turn out to grow. That is why OCI Material of Korea as well as Japanese manufacturers is maintaining a cautious stance.

Ne (neon) is popularly used as a purging gas for excimer laser. It is applied to a risograph of the semiconductor manufacturing process and also utilized for a wiring anneal of LCD. It is pointed out now over the world that there is a rapid increase in use of risograph for the 3-D element which is a cutting edge semiconductor now. In general, KrF or ArF is used for a gas to energize laser, but is rather little quantity-wise. More utilization of Ne for purging is very noticeable. The largest user of Ne is Samsung Electronics of Korea. There is a viewpoint that Samsung’s reinforcement of Ne purchasing strategy to stabilize production in addition to the increased consumption has caused the world-wide shortage of Ne.
As each of the Ne sources requires a gigantic air separation unit (ASU), there have existed only several locations in the world since the beginning to produce Ne at a commercial level. Therefore, the structure of market in itself is apt to cause tightness in the event that more applications come out.

C4F6 (Hexafluoro1,3 butadiene) and WF6 (Tungsten hexafluoride) were brought up owing to the increased demand for the process of 3-D elements. In the 3-D elements, a multi-layered thin film structure (more than 50 layers) is produced. To connect with the thinnest possible film, the connecting wires require more deep-etching for the multi-layer structure. C4F6 is an essential item for this deep etching. When it comes to WF6, there is a lot more increase in the use for CVD applied to the wiring process. So, there is a rapid growth of demand now in either Korea or Japan. At the supply side of C4F6 there are Kanto Denka Kogyo and Showa Denko, while we have Kanto Denka Kogyo, Central Glass, OCI Materials, Air Products and Matheson for WF6. At the moment, however, none of them show any movement for expansion of facilities.

As specialty gases are related directly to the production process, the demand continues increasing with the expanded applications including semiconductor IC, MEMC, sensor and LCD. However, it cannot be said that any appropriate gas market has been formed because of the strong power of end users. Should the short supply condition still continue from now on, it may cause a shutdown of the production of semiconductors. The gas producers and gas suppliers, however, have got exhausted with so serious declining in profitability that their still remain slow in movement. In the current situation there is no guarantee that the end users will fulfil the terms of agreement, although there are some suggestions to conclude a take-or-pay contract.