Ereztech: Ready for business

Amid trying times, precursor supplier, Ereztech, has opened at US manufacturing facility to deliver more materials to more compound semiconductor manufacturers.

While the coronavirus pandemic might be a surprising time to launch a manufacturing facility, Ereztech has done just this. In May this year, the manufacturer of organometallic precursors - critical to semiconductor thin film deposition – opened its new R&D lab and manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, US.

The new operation adds US manufacturing capability to Ereztech's Russia-based distribution network of precursor manufacturers and manufacturing operations. And it also allows the company to synthesize more exotic and reactive precursors based on pyrophorics and noble metals.

“Coronavirus and the subsequent economic challenges certainly add a layer of uncertainty but we see this only as a short- to mid-term problem,” says Ereztech chief executive, Roman Rytov. “This expansion brings our advanced and cost-efficient precursor development closer to our US customers allowing for a broader product selection and accelerated development.”

“We started the process for setting up the facility back in 2019 and nobody predicted that this [pandemic] would happen but we are very positive about the future,” he adds.

Ereztech chief executive, Roman Rytov.

Indeed, Rytov and his Ereztech colleagues are probably well-placed to deal with these uncertain times. Without a doubt, working with organometallic precursors is hardly a predictable business, with these reactive complexes often delivering surprising chemistry.

As Rytov puts it: “We've witnessed curious stories such as synthesising a molecule which the customer anticipated being solid and the end result was a liquid... This type of chemistry often surprises, but for us, this is normal.”

Indeed, for every ten new molecules that the company initially synthesises - to assess for stability and yield - only one will be suitable for further processing and scaling. So with this in mind, Ereztech has developed its so-called 25 grams program, which promises at-cost synthesis of as little as 25g of a target molecule, while protecting intellectual property for its customers.

According to Rytov, the program allows molecule characteristics to be analysed swiftly and efficiently and can help to provide reliable and predictable pricing for larger molecule quantities.

“We believe this program is unique amongst precursor materials manufacturers,” he says. “Due to the high risk of failure at this stage of precursor development, we decided to find out the absolute minimum viable amount of a molecule you need to synthesise, to understand how it works, and at 25g, this doesn't come with a large price tag.”

And if the 25g test batch is stable and meets purity standards, then Ereztech can refine the compound and eventually scale production to thousands of kilograms. “Customers can get 25g of a new molecule for as little as US$1500,” says Rytov. “We've had tens and tens of molecules that have gone through this process... and molecules that have come out of this program and gone into volume production with customers now make up some 50% of our overall business.”

Ereztech is serving up precursor R&D, synthesis and volume manufacturing from its new US facilities.

For the semiconductor industry, and especially compound semiconductor players, this trial-batch method makes sense. As manufacturers become ever-more reliant on MOCVD and ALD vapour phase processing, having access to a reliable source of precursors is critical. And the slow but steady rise of ALD has also meant manufacturers can experiment with more options for volatile precursors.

During ALD, the gas precursors are typically pulsed into the reaction chamber one at a time to slowly deposit the thin film. Crucially, the release of precursors is separated by inert gas purging to avoid unwanted gas phase reactions.

As Ereztech's chief technology officer, David Roberts, points out: “Separating these reaction components was a real game-changer and people have been using precursors that simply wouldn't have even been considered back in the 1990s due to issues over contamination of the deposited material.”

“We've seen this explosion in precursor options that didn't work well with CVD – many were rejected years ago, but are now coming back for ALD,” he adds.

Proliferating device types and shrinking geometries also see industry players experimenting with different thin films and epitaxy layers to achieve the finer features during deposition processes. Roberts points to the need for Group III-V channel replacements, Ta and Mn nitride sources for dimensionless copper barriers as well as high k dielectrics for MOSFETS.

“Many manufacturers don't want to necessarily use the usual metal-alkyl and metal-hydride ligand precursors, but want to try something a little different.” he says. “For example, we've seen increasing interest in gallium sources that are not alkyls... and I think people are really beginning to investigate this particularly for nitrides.”

“We do also see a lot of work in the simple oxides; it's amazing the utility of that kind of thin film, and sometimes it's difficult to tell what manufacturers are using that for,” he adds.

Ereztech chief technology officer, David Roberts.

Critically for Ereztech, the company will now be able to synthesize these more weird and wonderful, and reactive, precursors in its US facility. According to Roberts, importing such materials from Russia to the US had sometimes proven problematic; air travel wasn't an option while shipment via sea was time-consuming.

Instead the company can now manufacture more and more of these up and coming precursors in the US. Case in point is diethyl zinc, increasingly used to produce highly conductive and transparent ZnO layers for transparent electrodes in thin film solar cells, piezoelectric sensors, transistors and more.

“This is a mainstay precursor in compound semiconductors and as we dig deeper into our new US capability, we can start to make more reactive materials such as this, that were difficult to bring into the country before,” says Roberts.

And as Rytov adds: “We are already making diethyl zinc, dimethyl zinc, pyrophorics and other products in the US... we're also expanding our product line with a few noble metal precursors, while duplicating some of our Russia-made qualified products.”

Still, few would disagree that the opening of Ereztech's new US lab in Wisconsin can't be the easiest of endeavours right now. COVID-19 complications have shuttered many businesses with the need for workplace sanitation, absences and limits to face-to-face interactions complicating operations worldwide.

However, Rytov isn't fazed. “We are still working with our industrial partners – activities are slower but we haven't got any cancelled projects,” he says.

“Before this, industry forecasts had been so optimistic and positive, and we'd been dreaming about opening a US facility for years,” he adds. “So we will bite the bullet and pull through... we see lots of opportunities in the compound semiconductor space - these are interesting times.”