Semiconductor History | 南科 — The Air Separation Plant That Feeds the Fab

The largest input to a semiconductor fab by volume is not silicon. It is nitrogen. Tools, load locks and cleanroom spaces are flushed continuously with ultra-high-purity nitrogen to keep oxygen and water away from wafers, which is why a leading-edge fab arrives with an air separation plant attached. Air Products 三福氣體 announced in May 2022 that two newly built air separation units had come onstream at 南部科學園區. They were part of a programme of roughly US$400 million, about NT$11.1 billion, to build, own and operate several large plants supplying ultra-high-purity nitrogen, oxygen, argon and hydrogen to new and existing fabs in the park. The customer was not named. Air Products described it only as one of Asia's largest semiconductor manufacturers, which is the convention in this part of the industry, and a reader can draw the obvious inference from the address without the company confirming it. The subsidiary has been selling gas in Taiwan for more than seventy years. It runs what it calls one of the world's largest ultra-high-purity nitrogen pipeline systems in the south of the island, has around 800 staff and more than twenty production sites, and was the first industrial gas company in Taiwan to hold ISO 9002 and ISO 14000 certification. Pipelines are the point. Gas at this purity cannot sensibly be trucked, so the supplier builds inside the fence line and runs product over it, which is how a science park stops being a collection of tenants and becomes a single machine. In July 2026 the company announced a further expansion of that network, citing advanced packaging among the reasons. The photograph shows the plant from a public road, behind an Applied Materials monument sign carrying the company's name in Chinese and English. Its distillation columns and storage tanks are painted from the ground up with green grass and a blue sky full of cloud, so that a cryogenic air plant reads at a distance as a landscape, above a kerb lined with parked scooters. Two of the fab's suppliers stand in one frame, the gas company and the equipment maker, and neither of them makes a chip. That is roughly the correct proportion for how this industry works. Photo: 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.