From left, managers John Conard, Karen Schuyler, Pat Butler and Jennifer Phillips review wiring plans at ICL Performance Products. The plant at the edge of North Lawrence is wrapping up construction of a high purity drumming facility, which gives the plant the technology to produce and package the cleanest phosphoric acid available from a North American source. Such acid is used in manufacturing semiconductors, fabricating circuits and putting together dozens of other electronic items, including flat-panel TVs and monitors. Conard is engineering manager, Schuyler is plant manager, Butler is project manager and Phillips is acid business manager for the plant.

Vince Vannicola, a furnace operator, records data in a monitoring station at the ICL Performance Productions plant, 440 N. Ninth St. The plant's acid travels through a series of new pipes and filters on its way to a new packaging area at the plant, one designed to eliminate even the smallest of contaminants from getting into the liquid.

ICL Performance Products is poised to pour its products into the most high-tech of industrial work, now that the company’s plant at the edge of North Lawrence is equipped to deliver a new level of highly purified phosphoric acid.

ICL is spending more than $4 million to upgrade its plant so that it can produce and package the super-clean acid, a necessary cleaning component in the etching process for integrated circuits, computer chips, flat-panel monitors and other electronics necessities.

“The electronics market is growing,” said Jennifer Phillips, acid business manager for the plant at 440 N. Ninth St., at the edge of North Lawrence. “Every year, whether it’s flat-screen TVs, flash drives or cell phones, there’s just a real growing need for electronics, and it’s growing every year.

“And every year that it grows, the quality of the acid we need to supply our customers gets tighter – and when I say tighter, I mean cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.”

So, just how clean?

We’re not talking about Ivory soap, and all that talk of “99 and 44/100th percent” pure.

“It’s much better than that,” said John Conard, engineering manager. “It’s 99 with nine nines after it.”

Thinking small

Try thinking of measuring the particles – flakes of chrome, nickel, iron or even the tiniest of air bubbles – making it through in these proportions for each batch of ICL’s branded PurEtch phosphoric acid:

¢ One square foot among 36 square miles.

¢ One bad apple in 1 million barrels of the fruits.

¢ One pinch of salt on 10 tons of potato chips.

Or, for hoops fans, how about three tennis balls contained in the vastness of Allen Fieldhouse.

“It’s like one human hair, divided by about 100,” said Pat Butler, project manager and senior engineer. “It’s very, very small particles.”

Such performance comes with a price.

ICL is investing more than $4 million in its acids project in Lawrence, for upgrades that will be counted upon to perform under precise tolerances and at considerable extremes.

The project’s laboratory and clean room are designed with ventilation systems that will circulate external air 200 times each hour. The project’s piping system, which transports the liquid acid from production to packaging, is equipped with 40 valves, each designed to prevent even the smallest air bubble from making its way inside.

“A lot of people don’t realize the technology it takes to get that iPod, or get that cell phone,” Butler said last week at the plant, as workers adjusted the system behind him. “It takes this kind of technology right here.”

That’s because the manufacturing of consumer electronics is awash, literally, in phosphoric acid.

Cleaning up

Silicon wafers are cleaned in baths of phosphoric acid – the same liquid used to put the zing in a can of cola, only orders of magnitude more pure – both before they’re etched, and again once levels of silicon oxide and silicon nitride have been scraped away to form circuits.

Any particles left behind – either by such etching or from the acid itself – can cause a circuit to lose efficiency and performance, two problems that simply can’t be tolerated as computers go from being desktops to laptops to handheld devices to, well, who knows what might come next?

Meteor shower

“If you don’t have all the particles out of there, it’s like hitting the chips with a meteor,” Butler said. “It breaks these very delicate electrical connections, and you’re done for.”

That’s why the plant’s upgrade is so important, said Karen Schuyler, plant manager.

ICL now has the only plant in North America capable of producing and drumming – that’s packaging, in sealed 55-gallon drums – the highly pure acid.

While the project hasn’t meant any new jobs or plans for more in Lawrence, it is bringing confidence to the plant and its 165 workers. ICL’s decision to make a multimillion-dollar investment, and to rely on the workers to continue their precision work, is a sign of long-term confidence, Schuyler said.

“We’re not going to stop here,” Schuyler said. “The smaller the computer chips get, the more important the purity of the acid becomes. And so in order to compete in that marketplace, we are going to make sure our product is going to work in the electronic and integrated circuit industry. :

“This is certainly a critical component of really making sure we remain competitive into the future.”