If Idemitsu Kosan's Tokuyama Complex stops, TSMC, Samsung, and Intel will all be unable to produce a single state-of-the-art semiconductor chip.

I will explain why this happens using Valentine's Day chocolate.

Have you ever made handmade chocolate for Valentine's Day?
You melt the chocolate, pour it into a mold, cool it, and take it out.
That simple process actually has the same structure as the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

When making semiconductor chips, there is a process of printing circuit patterns onto a silicon wafer. The chemical used for this printing is called photoresist.
Photoresist is made of three components.
I will explain using the chocolate analogy.

First: Adamantane derivatives
This is the chocolate itself. It creates a sturdy framework that does not melt even when exposed to light. It acts as the pillars supporting the thin lines of the circuit.

Second: PAG onium salts
This is a magic powder that suddenly softens only specific areas when it receives light.
Imagine mixing it into chocolate, where only the parts hit by a flashlight become fluffy and soft. This property is used to draw circuit shapes with light.

Third: GBL derivatives
This component adjusts the compatibility with the chemicals that wash away the softened parts.
If the washing precision is poor, the circuit lines will blur and break.
Only when all three are present can the desired circuit pattern be completed.

A world where even one molecule of debris is not tolerated

Semiconductor circuits are now a world smaller than viruses.
At this scale, the circuit will break if even a single molecule of impurity is mixed in.A broken semiconductor will not work. It is a total loss.

There is an even more serious situation. If you use resist containing impurities, abnormal reactions occur inside the EUV exposure equipment. If even a tiny amount of volatile components adheres there, a machine worth tens of billions of yen becomes unusable.

That is why the usable resist is extremely limited.
Currently, there are only four companies in Japan that can make photoresist usable by the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers. JSR, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, Shin-Etsu Chemical, and Fujifilm. Circuits of current precision cannot be made with resist from any company other than these four.

Why can only these four Japanese companies make it?

There are two reasons.

First: 30 years of working in tandem
Every time TSMC designs a new chip, engineers from JSR or Shin-Etsu have been stationed at the factory to adjust the resist together. That accumulation spans 30 years.

This knowledge is not disclosed as patents. It is accumulated as secrets within the company. Even if a newcomer brings in resist, it takes years just to match the compatibility with TSMC's production line. The manufacturing opportunities lost during that time are on the scale of hundreds of billions of yen.

Second: Raw materials never touch the air
In Japan, raw materials move only through sealed pipes and tanks from the raw material factory to the resist factory. From the moment it is shipped until the moment it becomes a product, it never touches the outside air.

If even one molecule of moisture in the air gets mixed in, the quality changes. Overseas manufacturers without this system cannot, in principle, achieve the same purity. They would have to develop other ways to increase purity, which alone would take years.

And one factory in Yamaguchi Prefecture that all four companies depend on
This is the core.
All four Japanese companies procure the framework component of photoresist, adamantane derivatives, from the same place. It is Idemitsu Kosan's Tokuyama Complex in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Why only here?
There are several ways in the world to make adamantane derivatives, but the mainstream method uses a highly corrosive chemical called "aluminum chloride" as a catalyst. This method has a fatal flaw. It cannot completely prevent metal residue from mixing into the product.

Semiconductors are a world where not even one molecule of metal impurity is tolerated. With adamantane derivatives mixed with metal residue, state-of-the-art semiconductors cannot be made.

Only Idemitsu Kosan's Tokuyama Complex uses a completely different method using a solid catalyst called "zeolite" to mass-produce adamantane derivatives on a commercial scale without metal residue contamination. They industrialized this method for the first time in the world in 2008, and it is still the only facility in the world.

The global market share is about 70%. The rest is the conventional product with metal residue contamination.

If it stops, no one can make it instead

What happens if Idemitsu Tokuyama stops?
The four companies—JSR, Tokyo Ohka, Shin-Etsu Chemical, and Fujifilm—will simultaneously stop producing state-of-the-art resist. There is only a few weeks' worth of inventory.
TSMC's state-of-the-art lines (3nm/2nm) will stop. Samsung's EUV lines will stop. Intel's Foundry will stop.
NVIDIA's AI GPUs, Apple's A-chips, Qualcomm's Snapdragon. All semiconductors 7nm and below will become impossible to manufacture.

There is no factory on Earth that can make them instead.
It will take at least 4 to 6 years just for technology transfer of the zeolite method and facility construction.
During that time, the global AI and semiconductor industries will be capped at maintaining the status quo. Even if new data centers are built, the chips to put inside them cannot be made.

And now, the raw materials for that factory are no longer arriving

Adamantane derivatives are made from a byproduct called the C5 fraction that comes out when naphtha is thermally cracked.
This year, with naphtha from the Middle East no longer arriving, the amount of that C5 fraction has plummeted. The light naphtha imported as a substitute from North America significantly lowers the yield of the C5 fraction

.Calculations show that the production volume of adamantane derivatives this year may have fallen to 3-4% of last year's
. The Idemitsu Tokuyama factory is running. However, the raw materials are not coming
.A running factory is effectively stopped due to a lack of raw materials. This is what is happening right now in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Summary

Photoresist is a chemical for printing semiconductor circuits.
Only four Japanese companies can make state-of-the-art products.
The reason lies in 30 years of secret know-how and a zero-impurity pipeline supply system.
And all four companies depend on adamantane derivatives from one factory in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
The raw materials for that factory have stopped arriving as of this year.

The semiconductor supply chain is explained in detail in Chapter 5 of "The Day the Unsung Hero Disappears," so please take this opportunity to read it.