albemarle interview
place has been very positive. For a large part, incentives have not been necessary to convince the chipmakers to try our products. They all seem very excited about having a new supplier in the market, and beyond the occasional free sample to run qualifications nothing else has been necessary.
Q
Prices of some materials, such as indium, are highly volatile. Will these strong fluctuations in price be passed on to the customer?
AMWe have a lot of experience with expensive metals with volatile pricing, like molybdenum and rare earths.
We understand how to buy those in the most cost- effective manner. We also understand how to reduce the utilization of some of those materials so that we can offer a better price to the customers. But at the end of the day, we are not going to loose margin or profitability.
Q
Impurities drive down device performance. How pure are the materials you supply?
AMWe’ve certainly got the ‘six-nines’ purity that is required today. But we believe that [impurity
specifications] are going to be more and more strict, so we are not just stopping at what one customer wants. We are continuing to drive to have the best performing product in the market. We have really ramped up our analytical efforts. We know how to detect extremely low impurities, and we are going to keep monitoring that and driving it down and improving our process.
Q
How do you determine the quality of your material in your metal organic bubblers?
AK So far, every batch of TMG and TEG that we produce has been sent to a third party to grow a thin
film of GaAs. We’ve conducted a Hall test on these thin films, looking at the mobility as well as the background doping. This ensures that it will be successful in MOCVD applications.
In conjunction with that we do analytical testing using ICPMS [inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy], which has a very low detection limit, and also proton NMR for the oxygen impurities.
Q
Trimethylindium has a reputation as a difficult source to work with, partly due to variations in ‘pick-up’ concentrations. How stable is the trimethylindium gas flow produced by your source?
AK In parallel with the scale up of the chemistry for TMI [that we are doing right now], we have a couple of
designs for bubblers to give good stability as well as good utilisation. We plan on conducting tests with those bubblers using an Epison [in-line gas concentration
monitor] to determine the pick-up rate and utilization. Once we fix a design for that bubbler we will start building.
Q
There are safety issues associated with handling metal organics. How do you help the customer in this regard?
AMThat’s really where our strength lies. In all of our organo-metallic business that we supply today we’re
doing safety shows, training operators, training engineers and carrying out a significant product stewardship program. We are surprised that there is not more of a demand for that in the LED market.
Q Q
The LED business will be your primary market. Will you also be going after other parts of the compound semiconductor industry?
AMOur aim is to be the leading high-purity or regular-purity organo-metallic supplier to the electronics
industry. So wherever there is a need for an organo- metallic, at whatever type of quality, we would like to be there and supply.
Some academics have MOCVD tools. Can you cater for their relatively modest needs, in terms of material volumes?
AK Yes. Students eventually become customers in the commercial world, and if they have experience with
our materials, our quality and our service, then we will look at that as an investment in the future. So we have a capability and can supply smaller bubblers down to 150 ml, which is typically used for a lot of research in institutions.
© 2011 Angel Business Communications. Permission required.
Albemarle’s core strengths Albemarle is a multi-national chemicals manufacturer with an annual
turnover of $3 billion. It is headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and it is organized into three divisions: catalysts, polymer solutions and fine chemicals. Metal-organics precursor manufacturer takes place in the catalyst group because organo-metallics are widely used for the production of polymer catalysts. Albemarle has been producing organo- metallics since the 1950s, and it claims to lead the world leader in this market, in terms of manufacturing volume, experience and production
facilities.The company’s polymer solutions division is active in electronics and supplies flame-retardants to PV makers, cell phone makers and computer makers. The company’s third division, its fine chemicals group, focuses on pharmaceutical and agricultural chemicals. However, they also make precursors for the OLED market and some products for the electronics sector.
November/December 2011
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 31
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224 |
Page 225 |
Page 226 |
Page 227 |
Page 228 |
Page 229 |
Page 230 |
Page 231 |
Page 232 |
Page 233 |
Page 234 |
Page 235 |
Page 236 |
Page 237 |
Page 238 |
Page 239 |
Page 240 |
Page 241 |
Page 242 |
Page 243 |
Page 244 |
Page 245 |
Page 246 |
Page 247 |
Page 248 |
Page 249 |
Page 250 |
Page 251 |
Page 252 |
Page 253 |
Page 254 |
Page 255