China has reportedly cut off a critical tungsten feedstock to Japan, leaving chip gas suppliers with empty tanks and panicking customers.
According to Trendforce, Japanese firms Kanto Denka and Central Glass are said to be facing serious shortages of tungsten hexafluoride, a gas needed for semiconductor manufacturing. The pair supply the stuff to Samsung, SK Hynix and TSMC, which means this is not some minor supply-chain hiccup.
The gas is made using tungsten, and roughly 60 to 70 per cent of its production cost comes from high-purity tungsten powder. Japanese suppliers have relied heavily on China for that material, which now looks like a rather awkward dependency.
China has tightened export rules on tungsten, and shipments of high-purity tungsten powder to Japan have reportedly fallen to zero this year. Japanese firms kept production running for about five months, but have failed to find a replacement source.
That has left Japan with limited stock to serve the chip industry’s appetite. It is a nasty problem because tungsten hexafluoride is used in 3D NAND and HBM memory architectures, where it fills nanoscale vias linking transistor layers in advanced chips.
SK Hynix has been pushing tungsten materials for its 375-layer NAND plans, while Samsung already uses tungsten in its latest NAND products. TSMC is likely to feel the pinch because advanced process nodes need the same kind of specialist materials that nobody thinks about until they vanish.
Chinese suppliers, meanwhile, have seen their stock prices rise as the shortage bites. If China becomes the only place able to pump out semiconductor gases at volume, offshore customers can expect prices to get a kicking.
Further shortages across the semiconductor market could push prices up across products that are already painfully expensive. With DRAM and NAND demand rising, this one has all the signs of another supply-chain mess waiting to land on customers’ invoices.
