“In a relatively small market, many people would consider technical challenges the biggest obstacle. But in Jing Zhu's view, the real challenge is not R&D. It is whether customers are willing to give you an opportunity to test your products. Once a customer is willing to test them, we can keep improving and refining them.”

In semiconductor fabrication plants, the most dangerous contaminants are often those invisible to the naked eye.

A single particle measuring just a few micrometers or even submicrometer in size, or an extremely low concentration of airborne molecular contaminants (AMCs), can affect critical wafer manufacturing processes. At the 5 nm process node, a tiny particle or just 5–17 gas molecules can occupy a space comparable to the critical linewidth, potentially compromising manufacturing yield.

In modern semiconductor manufacturing, a cleanroom is no longer simply a dust-free environment. It is a highly controlled space that requires continuous monitoring of multiple contamination sources, including particles, acidic gases, alkaline gases, and volatile organic compounds.

As advanced semiconductor processes continue to evolve, contamination control is expanding beyond cleanrooms to include electronic specialty gas delivery systems, vacuum environments, and the interiors of advanced packaging equipment. Meanwhile, monitoring equipment is shifting from offline sampling and spot checks to continuous, around-the-clock online monitoring, becoming an essential component of semiconductor fabrication infrastructure.

Compared with high-profile equipment such as lithography and etching systems, this is a relatively niche market. Yet its technological barriers are far higher than many people might imagine.

The industrialization of laser particle counters in the United States and Japan dates back to the 1960s. By the 1990s, overseas manufacturers had established a dominant position in the global market, while China's domestic development lagged behind. Today, the challenge is even greater in the field of high-pressure gas particle counters capable of detecting particles as small as 0.1 μm, where U.S.-based Particle Measuring Systems (PMS) has long held a dominant position.

After years of dedicated development, Shanghai Lasensor Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Lasensor”), a startup incubated by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has achieved a breakthrough in high-pressure particle counting technology, taking a significant step from zero to one.

Founded in 2017, Lasensor develops and manufactures advanced monitoring instruments that use high-precision laser sensing and other technologies to provide rapid detection and early warning of airborne particles and microorganisms. The company is a leading Chinese developer and manufacturer of ultrafine particle monitoring equipment. Its development of China's first 0.1 μm airborne particle counter marked a breakthrough in a field long dominated by overseas suppliers, helping address a critical monitoring technology gap in the semiconductor industry.

In a relatively small market, many people would consider technical challenges the biggest obstacle. However, Jing Zhu of Lasensor believes otherwise:

“The real challenge is not R&D, but whether customers are willing to give you an opportunity to test your products. Once a customer is willing to test them, we can keep improving and refining them.”

01. A Niche Market Dominated by Overseas Suppliers for Decades

Unless they work directly in semiconductor manufacturing, few people pay much attention to particle contamination monitoring. It is often regarded as just one supporting component of cleanroom infrastructure.

In reality, cleanrooms are not entirely free of contamination. Instead, they require continuous control over the concentrations of different contaminants. In addition to airborne particles, acidic, alkaline, and organic molecular contaminants can affect wafer surface conditions, thin-film deposition, and other critical processes. Even exposure to AMC concentrations as low as 4 ppb for just 40 minutes can cause significant damage to semiconductor circuitry.

As the expansion of AI chips, advanced memory, and automotive-grade semiconductors drives increasingly stringent cleanliness requirements, cleanroom classifications are being pushed toward ISO Class 1 and Class 2, creating a growing need for ultrafine particle monitoring across the 10 nm to 0.1 μm range.

Zhu explained that advances in semiconductor manufacturing are imposing increasingly stringent particle control requirements throughout the supply chain, including electronic specialty gases and ultrapure water. In addition, many wafer fabs are beginning to require particle monitoring inside manufacturing equipment itself.

However, the operating conditions inside such equipment, including ultra-low-pressure and vacuum environments, differ significantly from those encountered in conventional measurement settings. This presents new challenges for particle detection.

The market has long been dominated by PMS, a U.S. company recognized as a pioneer in laser particle counting. Its liquid particle monitoring equipment has established a strong presence in advanced semiconductor fabs, with a reported market share exceeding 45%. The company is also a major supplier of gas-line nanoparticle monitoring equipment to leading memory and logic chip manufacturers, while maintaining a strong position in environmental laser particle counting.

Despite its technological importance, the market remains relatively small. According to financial disclosures from Spectris, the parent company of PMS, the market specifically dedicated to particle monitoring in the semiconductor industry is worth approximately US$300 million annually.

Zhu explained that when Lasensor was founded, domestic customers had few mature Chinese-made alternatives. Many high-end monitoring instruments had long depended on imports. At the same time, global demand for high-end laser particle counters was estimated at only tens of thousands of units, making the return on investment relatively unattractive and discouraging many companies from entering the field.

As the global semiconductor industry continues to expand, overseas suppliers have faced increasingly long delivery times. Domestic manufacturers, in turn, have developed a more urgent need for localized supply chains and responsive technical support.

For much of its early development, Lasensor devoted substantial resources to product R&D and customer validation. Drawing on nearly 30 years of accumulated technical expertise at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, the company successfully overcame the core technical challenges involved in detecting particles as small as 0.1 μm and brought the technology to market.

“Our key breakthrough was overcoming the technical challenges associated with high-pressure gas particle counters,” Zhu explained.

“PMS uses a helium-neon laser as its light source, but this approach has a drawback: gas can contaminate the optical lenses. We adopted a semiconductor laser instead, which effectively addresses this problem.”

He further explained that although PMS and Lasensor rely on the same underlying physical principles, PMS has dominated the semiconductor market for decades, and its technical approach has remained largely unchanged. Over the past decade, the research team at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics has been working to advance the technology by adopting more advanced laser sources and redesigning the gas flow path.

As a result, Lasensor has developed its own core components and manufacturing capabilities, strengthening its technological independence.

02. Commercializing Research: More Than Turning a Prototype into a Product

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Zhu spent his career in scientific research.

As China continued to improve its mechanisms for commercializing scientific and technological achievements, research teams at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics began exploring ways to bring laboratory-developed optical sensing technologies into real industrial applications.

“Scientific research may succeed with a single breakthrough, but a business cannot afford to fail even once.”

Zhu acknowledged that the biggest change after starting a company was not that R&D had become more difficult, but that his way of thinking had fundamentally changed.

“Scientific research solves technical problems. A business solves customer problems.”

Today, leading international semiconductor fabs have generally established comprehensive monitoring systems covering cleanroom environments, airborne molecular contamination (AMC), electronic specialty gases, ultrapure water, chemicals, and the internal environments of manufacturing equipment.

Once an instrument is deployed in a fab, every data point it generates must be reliable, every alarm must be traceable, and every maintenance procedure must be carried out without compromising production continuity.

From supplier qualification and prototype testing to on-site comparisons, stability verification, and long-term performance evaluations, the entire qualification and adoption process can take several months or even more than a year.

Zhu recalled that before securing its first customer validation opportunity, the team had already established a small in-house test line.

More importantly, an increasing number of customers have become willing to give domestically developed high-end monitoring instruments an opportunity to prove themselves.

Many industry partners shared their experience with Lasensor, offering guidance on how to develop test protocols, compare performance against international products, and complete on-site validation.

“In the beginning, there was still a performance gap between our products and competing products, and we encountered many new problems. But we are very grateful that our customers did not reject us outright because of these issues. Instead, they gave us valuable suggestions for improvement,” Zhu said.

“Of course, we also had the confidence to resolve these problems. We had nearly 30 years of technical experience behind us, and we understood the underlying physical principles and technical logic. That knowledge comes from years of accumulated experience.”

03. From a Single Instrument to a Broader Technical Capability

Although Lasensor initially focused on the semiconductor industry, Zhu does not want the company to be defined solely as an equipment manufacturer serving that sector.

In his view, what the company has truly developed is a particle detection capability, rather than simply a particular product.

This underlying capability can potentially be applied across a much wider range of industries.

Zhu explained that, beyond semiconductor particle monitoring, Lasensor is actively expanding into other application areas and technological directions.

For example, the company is developing instruments for detecting airborne particles near equipment surfaces and is already working with downstream customers to align the technology with their needs.

To address the challenges of monitoring flammable, explosive, and corrosive electronic specialty gases, Lasensor has also developed corrosion-resistant solutions.

In addition, the company is collaborating with leading domestic equipment manufacturers to develop online particle monitoring solutions suitable for vacuum and ultra-low-pressure environments inside manufacturing equipment.

In the biopharmaceutical sector, Lasensor is developing real-time airborne microbial detection equipment based on laser-induced fluorescence technology, with the aim of providing an alternative to conventional culture-based methods.

Real-time detection and remote sensing technologies also offer considerable potential in industrial environmental monitoring. In the future, as sensors become smaller and more cost-effective, applications could extend to air purification systems, smart buildings, and even consumer products.

At the same time, artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape the scientific instrumentation industry.

According to Zhu, the team has started exploring the use of AI to assist with software development and product design. It is also combining AI techniques with monitoring data to investigate new applications, including contamination source analysis.

In the future, online monitoring equipment may do more than simply detect abnormalities. By incorporating intelligent algorithms, it could also help customers identify the sources of contamination more quickly and improve operational and maintenance efficiency.

For Lasensor, moving from the laboratory into industrial applications was only the first step. The real challenge is to ensure that, across a growing range of advanced manufacturing environments, high-end scientific instruments developed in China become solutions that customers actively choose.

Read More: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/kIVzk2LLKYyGj-D7gGfabw