SEMI Liquid Chemicals Analytical Workshop held at SEMICON West 2025
By Suhas Ketkar, Elemental Scientific, Workshop Lead & Liquid Chemicals Technical Committee Standards Member
After a gap of many years the SEMI Liquid Chemicals committee brought back it’s Analytical Workshop at Semicon West 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona. Drawing an impressive crowd of over 60 in-person attendees and nearly 30 participants online, the workshop focused on the latest development in analytical technology to overcome the near-term challenges identified by the IRDS Roadmap.
The workshop opened with a presentation by Don Hadder of Intel on “Chemical Quality and Consistency Requirements for the Semiconductor Industry” which laid highlighted the need for chemical quality and consistency by providing a high level overview of the disruptive process excursions that can be caused by variability in the chemical quality.
Aaron Hineman of Perkin Elmer focused on the analysis of trace metallic impurities in challenging semiconductor chemicals using ICPMS. He focused on the recent developments and improvements in the ICPMS instrumentation to remove interferences.
Daniel Wiederin of Elemental Scientific focused on the development of advanced instrumentation with automation enabling the online measurement of trace organics, metals and nanoparticles in liquid chemicals. The presentation included the measurement of trace metals at parts per quadrillion level using novel in line preconcentration technique.
Gary Van Shoonveld of CT Associates, Derek Oberreit of Kanomax Holdings and Marie Tripp of Unisers Holdings jointly presented metrology for detection of particle precursors and sub-10nm particles in liquids and on-wafer. They focused on developments in techniques utilizing nebulization and aerosol particle counting technologies, specifically Liquid Nanoparticle Sizing (LNS) and Scanning Threshold Particle Counting (STPC), capable of measuring contaminants as small as 1.8 nm. They also presented on-wafer particle measurement capabilities to 8 nm using surface-enhanced particle sizing (SEPS) technology, demonstrating the critical correlation between liquid-phase contamination and wafer-level defectivity.
Larry Zazerra of CT Associates and Greg Haugstad of University of Minnesota focused on developments in the identification of organic particle precursors using FTIR-ATR, SERS and AFM-IR.
If you missed the workshop, you can find the recording and presentations here: SEMI Liquid Chemicals Analytical Workshop
The SEMI Liquid Chemicals committee would like to continue arranging Analytical Workshops at SEMICON West. For 2026 the committee would like to focus on developments in particle metrology for liquid chemicals as well as CMP slurries. The call for abstract will come out soon.
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December 8, 2025