Kanto Denka Kogyo plans to increase production capacity in stages of tungsten hexafluoride (WF6). A target is placed at 840 tons/year to attain in June 2017 and reinforcement is planned to bring up to 1,000 tons/year or over ultimately. 　
　
WF6 is one of specialty gases used as a wiring material for semiconductor, and is applied mainly to the deposition of metal tungsten by the CVD method. During these several years the demand of the gas has been rapidly increasing owing to the enhancement to 3D NAND and micronizing process of DRAM. Particularly, 3D NAND flash memories have started to be loaded on SSD (solid state disk) of which application is being accelerated for personal computers and data centers in place of HDD(hard disk drive). It is expected to remain demanded more extensively from now on.

Kanto Denka Kogyo has been expanding its production capacity of WF6 to cope with the increasing demand. The production capacity of 300t per year was doubled to 720t per year in October 2016, and now it is planned for more increase up to 840t per year and ultimately up to 1,000t per year in future.

The annual domestic demand of WF6 was 121 tons in 2016 according to Japan Industrial and Medical Gases Association (JIMGA)’s statistics. Although it is presumed that the demand will grow more with the expected capital investment of 3D memories by Toshiba, it seems that Kanto Denka’s plan of expansion aiming at a capacity of over 1,000 tons must have put into account overseas demands judging from the planned scale of capacity.

According to the comment of the company, the world market of WF6 is estimated to keep growing even after 2017 and a stable supply capacity will become indispensable.