Striving towards becoming carbon neutral and reducing the impact of CO2 on the climate is not an easy undertaking for any industry, and especially challenging for semiconductor manufacturers. Manufacturers must keep pace with the huge demand in a global market that is expected to grow to over 1,000 billion US dollars by 2030. One reason for this surge in demand is the explosive growth in global consumption of consumer electronics. In addition, the development of advanced IT applications such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things or machine learning technologies plays a major role.

The high-precision and complex manufacturing process with hundreds of process steps requires the use of a large number of gases and chemicals, e.g. in thin-film deposition, coating, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), lithography, metrology, etching and many more. However, nitrogen is by far the gas that is consumed the most.