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L5 · MaterialsMaterials

Specialty & Electronic Gases

High-purity gases for etch, deposition and lithography

Semiconductor manufacturing consumes dozens of ultra-high-purity gases for etching, deposition, doping and lithography, supplied mainly by industrial-gas majors Air Liquide, Linde, Air Products, Merck (EMD) and Taiyo Nippon Sanso. Certain gases — notably neon and other rare gases used in DUV/lithography lasers — have concentrated, geopolitically exposed supply. Disruptions in this layer directly stall wafer fabrication regardless of tool or wafer availability.

Majors

Air Liquide, Linde, Air Products, Merck, Taiyo Nippon Sanso

Critical gases

Neon, WF6, NF3, hexafluorobutadiene, xenon

Uses

Etch, deposition, doping, laser lithography

How it fits the stack

Specialty & Electronic Gases with what it depends on (above) and what it feeds (below). The figure renders as a crawlable diagram and upgrades to an interactive 3D graph as it scrolls into view.

usessuppliessuppliesSpecialty & ElectronicGasesMaterialsNeon GaschokepointSamsung FoundryTSMC (TaiwanSemiconductorManufacturing Company)chokepoint
Specialty & Electronic GasesDepends on ↑Feeds ↓

Specialty & Electronic Gases in the AI stack. Specialty & Electronic Gases with its immediate upstream dependencies (top) and downstream dependents (bottom) in the AI value chain. Hover a node in 3D, or read the full relationships below.

Graph data (text) — 4 entities, 3 relationships
  • Specialty & Electronic GasesusesNeon Gas
  • Samsung FoundrysuppliesSpecialty & Electronic Gases
  • TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company)suppliesSpecialty & Electronic Gases