Critical Materials for Semiconductor Chips

DuPont semiconductor materials enable the world’s most advanced integrated circuits

BY RYAN MAUS

TODAY, SEMICONDUCTOR CHIPS are found everywhere—in your laptop, cell phone, car, credit cards, and even your home appliances. But what you may not know is that products developed and produced at DuPont’s CMP Materials Center in Newark, Delaware, are critical to manufacturing some of the most cutting-edge chips in the world. To make high-quality chips it takes high-quality fabrication materials, such as those we make right here in Delaware.

At our Newark CMP Materials Center, we develop, test, and manufacture advanced polishing pads and slurries used in an enabling process called chemical mechanical planarization, or CMP. CMP is a critical step that is used many times throughout the chip fabrication process. Chips are built up through multiple layers of materials on a silicon wafer, and CMP is used to carefully remove excess materials after deposition to create a smooth surface. Each successive layer of nanoscale circuitry in these complex chips must be created with the utmost precision. Consider for a minute that variations in height are measured in angstroms, a unit of length that is one hundred-millionth of a centimeter. DuPont pads and slurries help our customers achieve an extremely fine level of control and our breadth of offerings can be used to meet different performance needs and process conditions.

OUR INNOVATION ROOTS RUN DEEP

Delaware’s technology innovation in CMP spans more than 50 years and multiple generations of companies, with our business first getting its start as Rodel, Inc. Rodel was founded in Delaware in 1968 by William Budinger (himself a former DuPont employee), who developed a technology that could remove dust and excess ink from plates in a printing press. The name Rodel was a play on “rollers of Delaware,” but you may recognize it because the Rodel Foundation, a nonprofit the Budinger family founded, continues today in its mission to support public education in Delaware.

The roller cover technology was later evaluated for additional applications, and ultimately, collaboration with IBM led us to use these principles to design a material that could create a flat (planar) surface on a semiconductor wafer, followed by the introduction of our first polishing pads for CMP. The DuPont IC1000™ polishing pad quickly established itself as the industry standard for planarization. Continuous improvements in our manufacturing operations and advanced quality control systems have enabled it to remain an industry benchmark to this day.

As chip fabrication processes grow in complexity, we continue to tighten quality specifications, and continue to innovate in new product offerings including our VisionPad™ and Ikonic™ polishing pad platforms, and Acuplane™ and Novaplane™ slurries. In 2020, the American Chemical Society recognized key contributors to our CMP pad portfolio recipients of its Heroes of Chemistry Award, acknowledging the valuable impact of this technology.

GLOBAL COMPANY, LOCAL IMPACT

Our Newark facility is unlike many other U.S. tech companies, as it’s not merely a manufacturing plant. In addition to production, we have research and development, a full polishing lab, quality engineers, a warehouse, supply chain, marketing and business executives onsite operating as one team. We work closely with teams at our sites in Taiwan, Korea, and our joint venture—NITTA DuPont Inc.—in Japan to develop, scale, and supply materials, while collaborating on best practices and global customer needs.

As the semiconductor industry continues to expand to meet increased demand, leading chipmakers are building massive new facilities in the U.S., and demand for materials is escalating. This creates even more opportunity for our CMP business to grow and innovate. We aim to be viewed as our customers’ “partner of choice” by building collaborative relationships that last. As a technology hub, we frequently host customers from the U.S., Asia, and Europe, who come to tour the facility, meet with our local experts, and discuss new technology projects.

Finally, I’m proud of the Newark site’s long record of giving back to our community. Through our employee resource groups and volunteer programs, we strive to impact the surrounding region as part of our sustainability goals. These include partnering with Special Olympics for 27 years (with more than 1,000 DuPont volunteers participating in 2022), supporting Junior Achievement of Delaware, and serving as a program partner of Jobs for Delaware Graduates. We’re also advancing sustainability through improvements to our own operations such as programs that reduce water usage onsite and technology innovations to bring our customers products that are more sustainable.

DuPont is a significant enabler for the semiconductor industry and we’re proud of how our technology and our people are driving advanced manufacturing here in Delaware.

Ryan Maus is the site leader for DuPont’s CMP Materials Center in Newark, Delaware.