Semiconductor-grade chemicals - are they still good enough?

Why are high purity chemicals back in focus at UltraFacility 2026? End-users see it as the next frontier.

When TSMC built its first advanced fab on US soil, headlines focused on the billions invested, the geopolitical significance, and the milestone of leading-edge chips being made in America. What got less attention was the chemical supply chain problem.

US suppliers could produce semiconductor-grade acid. But instead, TSMC's chemical partner Sunlit built an entirely new facility in Phoenix just to serve a single fab. The reason was twofold: cost and trust. The qualification of new suppliers was a major hurdle.

The chemicals challenge in semiconductor manufacturing has always played second fiddle to the headlines about water, power, and equipment. Unlike ultrapure water – where decades of industry investment, SEMI standards, and rigorous working groups have built a mature, well-characterised discipline – pure chemicals have operated in a relative vacuum. Working groups that once addressed chemicals standards wound down. For years, the nodes were forgiving enough – but that is no longer the case.

At 2nm and below, the chemicals touching the wafer are under the same scrutiny as the water. The papers at UltraFacility 2026 show there is not just one gap to fill.

Below are 5 key questions the industry is asking in an era of advanced node chemicals, drawing from the confirmed abstracts for UltraFacility 2026 (16-18 September in Phoenix, AZ:

1. Can you trust a ‘semiconductor grade’ chemical?

The unfortunate reality is that the answer is more ambiguous than hoped. An upcoming paper from Entegris, Elemental Scientific, and 14Si Solutions analyzes two supplies of high purity Isopropyl Alcohol – both labelled ‘semiconductor grade’. However, advanced multi-modal analysis characterizing ultralow-level contamination showed two vastly different chemical profiles, highlighting an industry-wide issue of chemical supply.

The implication is crucial for procurement at advanced nodes, as the tools to see the difference now exist.

2. How to solve the invisible contamination problem

Molecular Vista’s presentation on IR-PiFM is the kind of technology which makes our reviewers stop and read the abstract twice. Coupling atomic force microscopy with infrared spectroscopy, it can chemically identify individual sub-5nm particles. Two particles – identical in size and shape under conventional imaging – were shown actually to be different (one silica and one polystyrene latex).

Why does this matter? When a yield excursion hits, engineers spend weeks or months tracing contamination back to its source and misidentification sends the investigation in the wrong direction. This tool eliminates wasted time and money.

3. Can we bridge the lab-to-fab gap with filters?

There is a well-known frustration in semiconductor filtration that lab performance data consistently fails to predict wafer defects. Engineers qualify a filter under controlled conditions, it passes, and the fab data tells a different story. Nobody has had a satisfying explanation for why.

14Si Solutions' paper goes after the root cause directly. Conventional filter qualification uses deliberately spiked challenge particles. Native particles, which are already present in chemicals, are smaller, more chemically varied, and behave differently under filtration.

As one of our technical reviewers put it: ‘the semiconductor industry lacks predictive, real-world characterization methods for nanoparticle retention’. For anyone who has ever qualified a filter in the lab and then watched the yield data disagree, this is the paper that explains why, and points toward a fix.

4. The chemical that runs every fab, but nobody can monitor properly

Sulfuric acid is one of the most widely used chemicals in semiconductor manufacturing – from cleaning to oxidation to stripping – and is consumed in enormous volumes in every advanced fab. But its corrosivity and ultra-high concentration has kept reliable inline measurement at the sub-20nm scale out of reach.

Fabs can no longer manage sulfuric acid quality blind. A joint paper between Kanomax FMT, WL Gore and CT Associates paper interrogates available measurement techniques head-to-head to uncover which is practical enough to monitor quality in real time inside a live fab process.

5. How to qualify chemicals while the regulatory clock is ticking?

At the same time as pushing purity limits, sustainability goals and regulations are bringing new chemistries onto the scene. An end-user told UltraFacility than a provider which can develop both green and pure chemistries holds the ‘golden ticket’.

A presentation from Huntsman will show how a new green chemical can be qualified for its reliable semiconductor performance while meeting relevant safety and toxicological expectations. It focuses on NMP (N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone), which is widely used in the semiconductor industry for critical tasks like photoresist stripping and wafer cleaning. But as a reproductive toxicant, it is coming under increasing scrutiny.

Day 0 high purity chemicals deep-dive

The questions above do not exist in isolation; they’re symptoms of the same underlying problem of a qualification system which is no longer built for advanced nodes.

At UltraFacility 2026, a 2-hour deep-dive workshop will explore the whole spectrum and the shift-left principle – that customers ask for suppliers to take ownership of quality earlier in the chain from formulation to point-of-use in order to survive in the new era of localized supply chains and advanced nodes.

With confirmed speakers already from Intel, GlobalFoundries, Entegris and Air Liquide – it brings together a spectrum of players for this shared infrastructure problem.

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