Fujifilm to build a new plant for advanced semiconductor materials in Taiwan

OREANDA-NEWS. January 20, 2016. FUJIFILM Corporation (President: Shigehiro Nakajima) has announced that its semiconductor business subsidiary, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Co.,Ltd. (President: Keiji Mihayashi; hereinafter “FFEM”) will build a new plant for manufacturing advanced semiconductor materials in the city of Tainan, to expand its production in Taiwan. The new plant is expected to be operational in August 2016, and will begin with production of developing solutions.

With the full-scale arrival of the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), the semiconductor market is projected to expand strongly in future. In this market climate, Taiwan has a high concentration of semiconductor factories with a large production share globally, making the region well-positioned to grow further as the hub of semiconductor production. FFEM established FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Taiwan Co., Ltd. in Taiwan's Hsinchu Country in 1996. The company began with the production of developing solutions, and has since expanded its array of production items to include photoresists*, CMP slurries** and image sensor materials***. The local production structure has constantly been enhanced, as seen in the launch of the second plant (Hsinchu) for producing cutting-edge NTI*4 developers in 2014, in a bid to address the ever-expanding demand for advanced semiconductor materials.

FFEM will build its third plant in Taiwan for producing advanced semiconductor materials in Science Park in Tainan City, where the manufacturing facilities of many of its customers are based. Taking advantage of its close proximity to customers' sites, the company strives to boost its customer-support capability and shorten its supply chain. Moving beyond just catering to the expanding demand for advanced semiconductor materials in Taiwan, Fujifilm will have multiple production sites to distribute risk and ensure a stable supply of advanced semiconductor materials to customers - even in natural disasters. The new plant will begin producing developing solutions, and gradually expand its range of production items.
With this Tainan plant in Taiwan, joining the network of existing production sites in Asia, at Shizuoka (Japan), Hsinchu (Taiwan), Suzhou (China) and Cheonan (Korea), FFEM will continue to strengthen its stable supply of advanced semiconductor materials and improve quality control further in order to attain a higher level of customer satisfaction.

FFEM is a subsidiary at the core of Fujifilm's semiconductor materials business, which forms part of the highly functional materials category on which Fujifilm has focused its commitment. The company produces and provides a worldwide supply of photoresists and image sensor materials*** used in the manufacturing process of semiconductors, as well as developers, cleaners, CMP slurries and other advanced semiconductor materials. It will continue to supply products useful for semiconductor manufacturing, and expand the customer support structure in its contributions to the advancement of the semiconductor industry.

• * Material coated on the wafer substrate when drawing circuit patterns in the pre-process of semiconductor manufacturing
• ** Stands for Chemical Mechanical Polishing. Abrasive agent for polishing wafers used in the process of semiconductor manufacturing
• *** Pigmented photosensitive materials for manufacturing the color filters of image sensors (e.g. CCD and CMOS sensor) used in digital cameras and mobile phones
• *4 Stands for Negative Tone Imaging. Patterning process that uses a negative-type developer that retains exposed areas on the substrate to achieve more refined details than when using the conventional positive-type development approach