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Entegris Opens New $55 Million Mass. Facility

The facility will be utilized to make products for the semiconductor industry, which demands levels of purity to the parts per quadrillion (ppq). With the allowable level of contamination at one ppq, it’s equivalent to one drop of water in a space the size of the Empire State Building.

Entegris Inc. today announced its new i2M Center for Advanced Materials Science, which is the result of a $55 million investment in Bedford, Mass. The facility will serve as the main innovation center for developing filtration and specialty coating technologies, which are used to improve yields in microelectronics manufacturing environments.

The 80,000-square-foot facility will be used to conduct R&D and manufacturing on filtration media, metal membranes, electrostatic clamps (E-Chucks) and proprietary advanced, low-temperature coatings. There will be 6,000 square feet of clean room space as well.

All of those facilities will be utilized to make products for the semiconductor industry, which demands levels of purity to the parts per quadrillion (ppq). With the allowable level of contamination at one ppq, it’s equivalent to one drop of water in a space the size of the Empire State Building.

The Billerica-based company currently has manufacturing, customer service and research facilities in the United States, China, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The company employs roughly 350 in Mass. and 3,500 employees worldwide. It also holds 618 U.S. patents and more than 1,000 in other countries.

Approximately 100 professionals will work at the i2M Center, and Entegris says many of them hold doctorates or other advanced degrees in material science and chemical engineering.

Bertrand Loy, President and CEO of Entegris, said: “i2M stands for ‘ideas to market’ and we intend for this facility to be our flagship innovation center for solving very difficult materials science challenges. Our customers run extremely complex manufacturing processes and the i2M Center reflects our commitment to developing truly innovative solutions to support their process advancements. As a global company serving global customers, we evaluated a number of locations for this new building. We chose Massachusetts because it is at the epicenter of some of the best engineering talent in the world.”

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