A South Korean research team has built an industrial chiller that hits -120°C using nitrogen as its refrigerant, a gas with a global warming potential of zero. The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) says the system delivers 15kW of cooling at that temperature, and the technology has been handed to Chago Engineering, a Korean semiconductor chiller maker, with a product launch targeted for 2027.
The engineering question underneath the announcement is simple to state and hard to solve: can you get deep, high-capacity cooling without the synthetic refrigerants that conventional vapour-compression chillers depend on? KIMM’s answer is to change the cycle, not just the fluid.
Why Etching Needs Deep Cold
Etching is the step where fine circuits are formed on a semiconductor’s surface. Removing the heat generated at that stage requires a coolant supplied at around -100°C, according to KIMM. As chips become more highly integrated, demand for more precise etching grows, and with it the load on the cooling system.
Conventional vapour-compression chillers, the workhorses of industrial cooling, often rely on refrigerants with high global warming potential. They also run into limits when cooling capacity has to be scaled up. Those two constraints are what the KIMM team set out to escape.
How the Turbo-Brayton Cycle Works
The system uses a Turbo-Brayton cycle, also called the reverse turbo-Brayton cycle. It produces extremely low temperatures by compressing and expanding nitrogen gas, rather than by evaporating and condensing a synthetic refrigerant. Nitrogen’s global warming potential is zero, so a leak carries no refrigerant-related climate penalty.
The compressor and turbine are the hard part. KIMM’s turbomachinery spins at up to 60,000 revolutions per minute, and at cryogenic temperatures ordinary lubricating oil freezes, which can cause equipment failure or performance degradation during ultra-high-speed rotation. The team’s fix is magnetic bearings that hold the rotor shaft in place without physical contact, making the machine oil-free.
The operating pressure is designed to stay below 10 bar, which the team says enhances safety. The unit itself is compact for industrial equipment: 1.6 metres wide and deep, 2.1 metres tall, simplified and downsized to minimise the floor space it takes up on a fab site.
The Numbers From Internal Testing
In in-house performance testing, the chiller reached -120°C within 30 minutes of start-up and operated at its target cooling load of 15kW within 60 minutes. Power consumption under rated operating conditions is 90kW. That ratio is the number a fab engineer will look at first: roughly six kilowatts of electricity for every kilowatt of cooling delivered at -120°C, before any heat recovery or facility-level optimisation.
The team stated that this is the first time in Korea a high-capacity turbo-Brayton cryogenic chiller has been developed to a market-ready level with verified operating performance. The work builds on earlier KIMM research that demonstrated cooling performance exceeding 10kW at -100°C in 2024.
What Zero-GWP Actually Changes
Refrigerant choice is usually an afterthought in cooling design and a central one in regulation and cost. A high-GWP refrigerant that leaks, or that has to be recovered at end of life, carries a compliance burden that grows with the volume of gas in the system. A large industrial chiller holds a lot of it. Nitrogen removes that burden entirely, and it is also cheap and abundant compared with specialty synthetic refrigerants.
The trade-off is that nitrogen cooling only makes sense in a closed loop built around turbomachinery, because the gas has to be compressed and expanded at high speed rather than phase-changed at modest pressure. That is why the magnetic-bearing turbine, not the nitrogen itself, is the real engineering achievement here. Zero-GWP is easy to claim and hard to deliver at 15kW and -120°C.
From Lab to Fab
KIMM has transferred the technology to Chago Engineering, a domestic manufacturer of semiconductor chillers, with commercial launch planned for 2027. The institute expects it to be used not only in semiconductor etching equipment but across industrial sectors that need large-capacity cryogenic cooling.
Dr Junseok Ko, head of KIMM’s Department of Energy Storage Systems, said the team had worked to advance the technology towards commercialisation since setting the goal of developing an industrial chiller in 2024. “Building on this achievement, we will continue developing industrial cryogenic cooling technologies that can be applied not only to semiconductor manufacturing but also a wide range of promising future industries,” he said.
KIMM is continuing research into Turbo-Brayton systems capable of reaching -250°C and -269°C, with potential applications in superconductivity, space, hydrogen, quantum technologies and nuclear fusion. Those temperatures are a different engineering problem again, but they run on the same cycle and the same oil-free bearing approach.
The Market Pull
The timing is not accidental. The market for chillers used in semiconductor manufacturing equipment is expected to continue growing as investment in fabrication facilities increases, particularly in Asia and the United States, according to Komori Corporation, which acquired Tokyo-based chiller maker Maruyama Chiller in October 2026 and renamed it Komori Precision Technologies. Komori cited growing demand tied to AI and data centres and higher levels of IC integration as the driver.
For buyers, the practical question by 2027 will be whether a nitrogen-based chiller can match the uptime and serviceability of the vapour-compression units fabs already know. KIMM’s test data covers start-up time and rated load. It does not cover years of continuous operation in a production etch line, and that record is what Chago Engineering will have to build.
Sources
- Chiller
- Nitrogen-based chiller targets semiconductor market with zero-GWP cooling
- Komori Strengthens Business Foundation in Semiconductor Manufacturing Sector
- KIMM Transfers Eco-Friendly Industrial Cryogenic Cooling Technology for Semiconductor Manufacturing, Targets 2027 Launch
- 60,000-rpm turbine chiller to cool semiconductor factories to -184°F
- Dr. Junseok Ko, Head of KIMM’s Department of Energy Storage Systems, introduces the Turbo-Brayton cryogenic chiller.
Photo: Owen Miller / Unsplash (Unsplash License)
