With the domestic semiconductor industry rapidly advancing toward advanced process nodes, wafer global planarization has become a critical factor determining lithographic accuracy and device performance. Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) serves as the core process to achieve this goal, and its key consumable-the silica sol abrasive-directly dictates the post-polishing surface planarity and defectivity of wafers through its purity, particle size uniformity, and dispersion stability.
For an extended period, the high-purity silica sol market for high-end semiconductor CMP has been monopolized by overseas brands. Imported products are not only exorbitantly priced and subject to unstable supply cycles, but their core technology iterations are also prioritized to align with the needs of leading overseas wafer manufacturers. Consequently, domestic enterprises struggle to obtain comprehensive technical support, making this a critical bottleneck constraining the self-sufficiency and independent control of China's semiconductor consumables.
Simultaneously, domestically mass-produced conventional silica sol products generally suffer from multiple pain points, including excessively high metal impurity content, poor particle size uniformity, and inadequate dispersion stability. If traditional ordinary silica sols are applied to high-end wafer CMP polishing processes, they readily induce defects such as surface scratches, pits, localized corrosion, and substandard planarity, rendering them completely incapable of meeting the stringent process standards and mass-production requirements of today's advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Therefore, the development of high-performance, ultra-high-purity, and stably mass-producible domestic silica sol, thereby breaking the reliance on imports, has become an urgent and imperative challenge for the entire semiconductor polishing materials industry.
Addressing these industry pain points and critical industrial demands, our company is deeply engaged in the field of high-end semiconductor electronic materials. We focus on overcoming the core technical hurdles of high-purity, high-uniformity, and high-stability CMP silica sol. By leveraging two synergistic process routes, we are breaking through the domestic technological bottlenecks: we can not only stably produce ultra-high-purity silica sol with a total metal impurity content of less than 20 ppm via the conventional ion exchange method-yielding products with well-regulated particle morphology and excellent stability-but we also utilize the sol-gel method to prepare ultra-high-purity silica sol. The resulting performance metrics from both routes fully meet the requirements for semiconductor CMP applications, thereby providing an effective technical solution for the domestic production of high-purity polishing abrasives.