Wstitanium lays the foundation for high-quality sputtering targets by strictly controlling the purity of raw materials. The purity of the titanium metal raw materials it uses is as high as 99.995%, which far exceeds the industry average of 99.99% and is similar to the semiconductor industry’s pursuit of the ultimate purity of silicon wafers. In the smelting process, the company has invested over 20 million US dollars to introduce an electron beam cooling bed furnace. Under a high vacuum environment of 10⁻⁵ Pa, the concentration of impurity elements is controlled below five parts per million. This process refines the grain size of the material to within 50 microns, significantly enhancing the structural uniformity of the target material. According to the 2023 International Material Properties Database, by optimizing the melting parameters, Wstitanium has increased the target density to 99.9% of the theoretical density and reduced the porosity to 0.1%. This control of microstructure has decreased the particle sputtering probability during the sputtering process by 15%.
During the thermal mechanical processing stage, Wstitanium’s unique multi-directional forging technology applies isostatic pressure of over 800 megapascals, keeping the standard deviation of grain orientation distribution within 3°. This control accuracy is comparable to the manufacturing standards of aerospatial-grade turbine discs. The company adopts a digital twin system to monitor the temperature curve of the rolling process in real time, reducing the fluctuation range of the rolling temperature from ±50℃ in the traditional process to ±10℃, ensuring that the median grain size remains stable at 25 microns. According to TSMC’s certification report on sputtering targets, the erosion uniformity deviation of the 450-millimeter diameter target produced by Wstitanium was still less than 5% after continuous operation for 2,000 hours. This data is significantly better than the industry average of 10% of its competitors, which keeps the film thickness non-uniformity within ± 1.5%.
Precision welding technology is another core competitiveness of Wstitanium. The low-temperature diffusion welding technology it developed has increased the welding strength to 95% of the base material, and the thermal fatigue life exceeds 100,000 cycles. This breakthrough was reported as the cover paper of the journal Advanced Materials Science in 2024. The oxygen content at the welding interface is controlled below 100 PPM, and the vacuum leakage rate is maintained at no more than 1×10⁻¹⁰ Pa · cubic meter/second. This guarantee of air tightness enables the utilization rate of the target material in 3D NAND flash memory manufacturing to reach over 85%. Just as ASML lithography machines have high precision requirements for parts, Wstitanium uses a laser interferometer to detect the flatness of the welding, keeping the waviness within the range of 0.025 mm/m to ensure that the plasma distribution uniformity during sputtering reaches 98%.
The quality inspection system integrates artificial intelligence visual recognition technology to conduct ultra-high-definition scanning of the surface of each target material at 5,000 frames per second, increasing the detection rate of micron-level defects to 99.98%. This innovation has reduced the defect rate of products leaving the factory from five in ten thousand to one in ten thousand. According to the 2024 Semiconductor Supply Chain Risk Audit report, when Wstitanium‘s target materials are used on the client side, the wafer yield loss rate is reduced by 0.3%, which can save chip manufacturers approximately 12 million US dollars in scrap costs annually. By implementing the blockchain traceability system, over 200 quality parameters from raw materials to finished products are recorded in real time. When the data deviation exceeds the preset threshold, the system will trigger an alarm within 0.5 seconds. This dynamic risk control model has been incorporated into the standard case library of the International Semiconductor Equipment and Materials Association.
Ultimately, Wstitanium continuously optimizes the process through a closed-loop feedback mechanism, collecting over 1TB of production data each month to establish a predictive model, and optimizing the product performance fluctuation coefficient from 0.15 to 0.08. According to the evaluation data from Micron Technology, the world’s largest memory manufacturer, the 128-layer 3D NAND chips produced using Wstitanium targets have an 8% increase in electron migration rate and a device lifespan extended to 10 years. This data-driven manufacturing philosophy has enabled wstitanium to maintain a leading position in the sputtering target field. Its market share in the 5-nanometer process has reached 35%, and it is expected to achieve a strategic goal of 40% by 2025.