EMD Electronics Opens 3,500-Square-Meter Semiconductor Materials R&D Center in the United States

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On October 2, EMD Electronics opened a new semiconductor materials R&D facility in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, USA, with a building area of approximately 38,000 square feet. The facility is primarily used for the synthesis, scale-up validation, and technology transfer of advanced materials required for next-generation chip manufacturing, and consolidates materials R&D, process scale-up, and customer validation capabilities within the same campus.

The new facility is equipped with 8 dedicated laboratories covering materials discovery, product development, customer qualification, analytical method development, purification, packaging, and hazardous testing. EMD Electronics uses these capabilities to shorten the cycle for new materials from laboratory R&D and process scale-up to customer qualification, and to support materials development required for advanced process nodes and more complex chip architectures.

The Sheboygan Falls project is part of EMD Electronics' $200 million multi-year investment plan in the United States. In addition to the commissioning of this R&D facility, the company also plans to continue expanding the campus, with related additional construction expected to be completed in 2027; the same round of investment also covers semiconductor materials and supporting capability projects in Carlsbad, California, and Catoosa, Oklahoma.

EMD Electronics is the electronics materials business of Germany's Merck Group in the United States and Canada, with products covering specialty gases, thin-film deposition materials, planarization and patterning chemicals, and semiconductor materials delivery systems. The company's electronics business is currently expanding capabilities in advanced packaging, metrology and inspection, and materials development, and in the second quarter of 2026 its semiconductor solutions business achieved 17.3% organic sales growth.

The new R&D facility is also incorporated into EMD Electronics' U.S. domestic semiconductor supply chain expansion plan and is being advanced in cooperation with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to promote local investment and technical job creation. The facility is designed to be powered by renewable energy, and the company plans to apply for LEED Gold certification.