1. Basic Policy for Research and Development Activities

The mission of our R&D department is to provide the electronics industry with the noble metal plating technology needed for surface mounting of state-of-the-art devices.

Noble metal plating customers are rapidly globalizing, and to respond to this trend, we need to promote our R&D activities in terms of both software and material technologies. Our basic policy for R&D is to respond to globalization by making full use of soft technologies, while at the same time fostering next-generation material technologies from a long-term perspective.

Soft technology is that proposes the optimal total process to the customer by considering under what conditions and in what combination of front-end and back-end processes our existing plating chemicals should be used. The target electronic devices are diverse, and so are the customer's facilities. It is required to come up with solutions in a short period of time on how to fit our existing products into the customer's facilities.

Materials technology, on the other hand, involves the development of new chemicals to solve problems that cannot be handled by existing chemicals. New chemicals are used in devices, go through the mounting process, and are finally evaluated in a series of electronics devices (finished devices) before being certified as a new product, so several years of study may be required from development to commercialization, requiring long-term planning.

Especially for products for which problems cannot be solved without discovering new compounds, we must also conduct environmental testing of new compounds, and long periods of R&D are inevitable but we consider it an essential condition for becoming a global fine chemical company.

2. Key issues in R&D activities

Since our establishment, we have been supplying noble metal plating chemicals with the electronics industry as our primary target. In recent years, specifications that reduce the amount of gold used (gold saving) by lowering the gold concentration of the plating solution and thinning the plating film are becoming more common, and the main challenge is to meet these specifications while maintaining the physical properties of the plating film.

Even under such circumstances, we were the first in the industry to achieve cyanide-free electroless gold plating chemicals for MPU packages, providing new value in terms of both technical problems solving and environmentally conscious orientation.

Furthermore, to compensate for the decline in sales of noble metal plating chemicals due to the trend toward gold saving, we are working to expand our accumulated noble metal plating technologies outside of the electronics industry and to apply them to plating technologies other than noble metals.

One of these is the development of battery materials. With the growing introduction of electric vehicles and renewable energy, batteries that are cheaper, lighter, and longer-lasting than conventional batteries are required. The charge-discharge reaction of batteries utilizes the same redox reaction (Redox reaction) as in plating. We have started to develop new technologies to contribute to solving the problems of battery materials with our Redox control technology cultivated through the development of plating chemicals.

To promote the development of these new technologies, it is necessary to develop a technical team with unique ideas that can compete with any other plating chemical manufacturers, whose technical staff is several times larger than ours. We will continue to hire and train highly qualified personnel who are willing to take on challenges in new fields, thereby raising the level of our technical team and strengthening our development capabilities. At the same time, we will seek optimal external collaboration to efficiently implement technological development that would be difficult for the Company to accomplish on its own.

Specifically, we will address the following issues

(1) Environmental issues

  • Plating technology that does not use hazardous substances (cyanide, lead)
  • Reduction of grain-derived raw materials
  • Reduction of plating waste

(2) Device support for new requests

  • Plating technology for 5G
  • Plating technology for high-density mounting technology
  • Plating Technology for Automotive Electronics

(3) Creation of new business areas

  • Development of technologies for battery materials such as electrolyte and electrodes

(4) Streamlining

  • Utilization of experimental data
  • Visualization of mechanisms

3. Results of research and development

The results of research and development during the period under review are as follows

(1) Nickel-free plating technology for 5G (DIG, EPIG)

This process is expected to be a final surface treatment process that can contribute to finer electronic circuits without the use of nickel-plating film, which is generally applied in thicker layers. In this fiscal year, several customers have made progress in their evaluations, and we are proceeding with the optimization of the entire process and preparations for commercialization.

(2) Electroless gold plating technology for high-density packages

Our environmentally friendly cyanide-free electroless gold plating solution for cutting-edge high-density semiconductor package substrates is now in mass production at our customers. Improvements are underway to further enhance performance.

(3) Gold plating technology for semiconductor interconnections

Customer evaluations are underway for cyanide-free electrolytic gold plating solutions for leading-edge semiconductors.

(4) Battery materials

We exhibited at the 14th International Rechargeable Battery Expo held in March 2023 and presented our R&D results on electrolyte and metal nanomaterials for next-generation batteries. We have received inquiries from both domestic and overseas, and are now preparing for sample work.