Electronic specialty gases are a branch of electronic gases. Compared with traditional industrial gases, they have a higher purity and more unique uses. Electronic specialty gases are valuable supporting materials for integrated circuits, display panels, solar cells and in other industries.
The main production processes of specialty gases include gas synthesis, gas purification, gas mixing, gas cylinder processing, gas filling, and gas analysis and detection. Gas synthesis is to obtain crude gas products through chemical reactions of raw materials under specific pressure, temperature, catalyst, and other conditions.
Gas purification is to refine crude products into higher purity products through distillation and adsorption. Gas mixing is to mix two or more effective component gases at a specific ratio to obtain a multi-component evenly distributed mixed gas. Gas cylinder treatment is a process of treating the interior, inner walls and outside of the gas cylinder according to the properties and needs of the gas, to ensure the stability of the product during gas storage and transportation. Gas filling refers to filling gas into pressure vessels such as gas bottles. Gas analysis and detection is the process of analyzing and detecting the gas components.
According to different preparation methods and application fields, industrial gases can be divided into bulk gases and special gases. Bulk gases include air separation gas and synthetic gas. This type of gas has large production volume and low purity requirements. It is mainly used in chemical energy, metal smelting and machinery manufacturing. Special gases can also be divided into high-purity gases: standard gases and electronic specialty gases. The downstream applications of electronic specialty gas include integrated circuit IC, display panel (LCD, OLED), photovoltaic and LED.
Integrated circuit manufacturing requires processes such as silicon wafer manufacturing, oxidation, photolithography, vapor deposition, etching, and ion implantation. This process requires more than 50 types of high-purity special gases and mixed gases, and each gas is used in in specific process steps. In addition, a variety of special gases are used in different process steps in the manufacturing of display panels, LEDs, photovoltaic cells, and other devices.
Electronic specialty gases are subdivided into etching gases, CVD gases, dilution gases, doping gases, epitaxial gases, ion implantation gases and light-emitting diode gases.
In the global electronic specialty gases market, the specialty gases consumed by semiconductors account for 73% of the total market, followed by display panels accounting for about 20%, compound semiconductors, LEDs, and photovoltaics accounting for 4% and 3% respectively.
Compared with the global market, the development of China’s semiconductor market is lagging behind, but has a world-leading scale advantage in panels and photovoltaics. The semiconductor market accounts for 42%, panel display accounts for as much as 37, photovoltaics account for 13%, and compound semiconductors and LEDs account for 8%. As China increases the development of semiconductor industries such as integrated circuits and wafer production capacity, China’s demand for semiconductor specialty gases is rapidly expanding, and there is a lot of space for market development.
According to statistics from the Semiconductor Association, China’s electronic specialty gas market continued to grow from 2010 to 2020, with the market size reaching 17.4 billion yuan in 2020. In recent years, growth accelerated in 2020 due to factors such as the transfer of the semiconductor and display industries to mainland China, and the rapid development of the photovoltaic industry.
There are current global electronic specialty gas giants such as New Linde (Linde Group and Praxair), Air Chemicals of the United States, Air Liquide of France, and Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corporation of Japan. Corporate institutions with advantages in Europe and the United States have blocked the development of electronic specialty gases on industrial chain and technical levels, especially on key electronic specialty gas products. China’s electronic specialty gas market has long been occupied by foreign-funded companies.
Improving the purity of specialty gases has become a technical bottleneck. Integrated circuits have strict requirements on the purity of electronic specialty gases, because during chip processing very small amounts of impurities may cause major defects in products. The higher the purity of special gases, the higher the yield and the better the performance of the product. With the continuous development of IC chip process, the production precision is increasing, and the electronic specialty gases used in integrated circuit manufacturing have also put forward higher purity requirements.
China’s processing technology does not comply with international standards, and most of the market is occupied by foreign companies. The integrated circuit manufacturing technology requires the purity of electronic specialty gas to reach 5N-6N (99.999%-99.9999%). Currently, the purity of most foreign manufacturers of electronic specialty gas can be maintained at 6N. Chinese companies are mainly in the mid-to-low-end field of 4N-5N, while a few can reach 6N.
The purity of electronic special gas is mainly affected by three factors:
The first is purification technology. The separation and purification of electronic special gas can be divided into three categories: distillation separation, molecular sieve adsorption separation and membrane separation. The accuracy of the product ratio must be ensured during the configuration process, raising the barriers to research and development.
The second is gas detection technology. As the purity of electronic special gases increases, higher requirements are put forward for analysis and detection methods and instruments. At present, the analysis of foreign electronic gases has gone through several stages such as offline analysis, online analysis, and in-situ analysis. A complete testing system has been developed for the analysis of high-purity electronic special gases. Since China’s electronic specialty gas industry emphasizes production and neglects testing, there is a gap between China’s analysis methods and instruments and those of foreign manufacturers.
The third is gas storage and transportation. The transportation of high-purity electronic specialty gases is a major difficulty. During the storage and transportation process, high-quality gas packaging storage containers, gas transmission pipelines, valves and interfaces are required to prevent secondary gas pollution.
