The most opaque supply chain on earth, decoded. Without hallucinating.
Real investigations. Real sources. Confidence grades you can actually check.
Three parallel agents. Korean, Japanese, and English searches running simultaneously. 80 seconds.
- 6 suppliers identified: Soulbrain, ENF Technology, Wonick Materials, Stella Chemifa, Morita Chemical, Foosung
- The complete pre/post-2019 supply chain restructuring: how Japan's export restrictions permanently shifted Samsung's HF sourcing from Japanese to Korean domestic suppliers
- Korean imports of Japanese HF fell 87.6% from 2018 to 2022, sourced from a real article accessed in the session
- 12+ specific sources cited across Korean, Japanese, and English press
- Soulbrain labeled CONFIRMED (multiple independent Korean press sources). Stella Chemifa's pre-2019 role labeled STRONG INFERENCE (Nikkei + revenue geography, but no direct Samsung confirmation found)
- A "What I Could Not Verify" section listing 6 specific gaps and 4 actionable next steps
Supply chain map with sourced confidence levels:
Honest gaps, failed searches, and next steps:
Full scenario analysis. Multiple agents. Trade data, corporate filings, defense think tank reports.
- The complete fluorine cascade: fluorspar to HF to NF3 + WF6 + CF4 + C4F8 + SF6 + fluoropolymers + LiPF6 (EV battery competition for the same feedstock)
- Stella Chemifa operates Chinese JV subsidiaries (Zhejiang Blue Star Chemical, Quzhou BDX) specifically to secure fluorspar, discovered via live search
- IDA Document D-5379 modeling a 71,847 metric ton fluorspar shortfall in a military conflict scenario
- China's own reserves are depleting: 11.75 year reserve-to-production ratio vs. 31.82 global average
- Koura/Sojitz building a Mexican-fluorspar-sourced HF plant in Fukuoka, the first non-China-sourced HF plant in Japan
- Country-by-country exposure assessment, alternative supply evaluation, and a week-by-week impact timeline
LLMs are confidently wrong about supply chains. They fabricate supplier relationships, invent filing references, and present training data as freshly researched fact. An investor acting on a hallucinated supplier relationship can lose real money. A policy analyst citing a fabricated filing loses their credibility permanently.
On top of that, about 80% of semiconductor supply chain information lives behind language barriers. The answer to "who supplies hafnium precursors to SK Hynix" lives in a Korean DART filing under 주요 거래처. Or in a Japanese EDINET report under 主요仕入先. Or in a Chinese STAR Market IPO prospectus under 前五名供应商采购额. Google Translate won't give you the right search terms for any of these (it translates "etch" to 에칭 but Korean engineers use 식각).
chipchain is a structured research methodology that makes every claim auditable. It knows where to look, what to search for in five languages, and how to steer research toward the things that matter: who supplies what, what's changing, what's at risk, and what the English-language press hasn't caught yet.
chipchain answers the question you asked and actively hunts for what you didn't think to ask:
- New products and capabilities not in any database yet. Company IR pages, earnings presentations, and patent filings reveal what's coming before press covers it.
- Competitive moats that make suppliers irreplaceable. Proprietary chemistry, qualification barriers that take years to overcome, geographic lock-in, sole-source positions.
- Financial signals that reveal strategic direction. Capex announcements, margin trends, revenue concentration, customer dependency disclosures. A company doubling capex on a material is a stronger signal than a press quote.
- Risks and bottlenecks that could disrupt the chain. Single points of failure, geographic concentration, export control exposure. What breaks if one supplier or one country goes offline.
- Upstream dependencies that are invisible until they bite. Trace backwards from tier-1 suppliers to raw materials. A bottleneck two tiers up is invisible until it causes a shortage.
- Disruption scenarios that map how countries, fabs, and end products are exposed when something goes wrong.
The methodology prioritizes company IR pages and regulatory filings over press articles. Filings disclose what press only summarizes.
English-language research covers maybe 20% of the semiconductor supply chain. chipchain searches in Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and German with industry-specific terminology that machine translation gets wrong.
Why machine translation fails:
If you Google Translate "etch" into Korean, you get 에칭. Korean semiconductor engineers use 식각. Search for 에칭 on ET News and you get noise. Search for 식각 and you get every article about Samsung's etch process.
Critical spelling trap in Japanese: silicon wafer = ウェーハ, not ウエハー. Both Shin-Etsu and SUMCO use ウェーハ. Wrong spelling, zero results.
For Chinese, eleven critical terms are completely different words between mainland and Taiwan. 光刻胶 (mainland photoresist) vs 光阻 (Taiwan photoresist). Search the wrong one and you're looking at the wrong country's supply chain.
Where to find supplier disclosures:
| Country | Filing System | Section that reveals suppliers |
|---|---|---|
| Korea | DART (dart.fss.or.kr) | 주요 거래처, 원재료 매입 현황 |
| Japan | EDINET | 主要仕入先, 主要販売先 (>10% revenue) |
| Taiwan | MOPS (mops.twse.com.tw) | 主要供應商, 前十大供應商 |
| China | cninfo (cninfo.com.cn) | 前五名供应商采购额 |
| Germany | Bundesanzeiger | Lagebericht (no mandatory supplier section) |
Chinese STAR Market IPO prospectuses (招股说明书) disclose top-5 suppliers by name with dollar amounts. This is the richest public source for Chinese semiconductor supply chain mapping, and almost nobody outside China knows it exists.
For the full methodology, see doc/ARCHITECTURE.md. The highlights:
Search first, know later. The agent searches before it speaks. Training knowledge is a hypothesis generator, never a source. If a search comes back empty, that gets reported as a result. No guessing to fill the gap.
Six-level confidence grading. Every finding is graded by how it was obtained, regardless of how plausible it sounds:
| Level | What it means |
|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | Source accessed this session, named relationship |
| STRONG INFERENCE | 2+ independent signals, this session |
| MODERATE INFERENCE | 1 indirect signal, this session |
| SPECULATIVE | Logical deduction from market structure |
| FROM SKILL DATABASE | Entity files, not verified today |
| FROM TRAINING KNOWLEDGE | LLM memory, lowest reliability |
Evidence type caps. Capability evidence alone (they make the material) can never exceed SPECULATIVE. Only a named commercial relationship, actually accessed, reaches CONFIRMED. See evidence-guide.md.
Making is not supplying. "Company X makes hafnium precursors" and "Company X supplies hafnium precursors to SK Hynix" are different claims requiring different evidence.
Source Registry before prose. Sub-agents return structured XML with URLs and verbatim evidence quotes. The orchestrator builds a numbered Source Registry before writing a single word of narrative. If a claim has no registry number, it doesn't belong in the report.
Counterfactual falsification. Every strong claim is tested: "If this were false, how would I explain my evidence?" See queries/counterfactual-check.md.
Full transparency. Every report includes a search log (what was searched, in what language, what came back) and a gaps section (what couldn't be verified and what to try next).
| Type | Example | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier ID | "Who supplies hafnium precursors to SK Hynix?" | Multi-language filing + press + patent search |
| Bottleneck | "Where's the chokepoint in EUV pellicles?" | Concentration risk with substitutability assessment |
| Change Detection | "What shifted in Korea's photoresist supply?" | Before/after with localization progress tracking |
| Reverse Lookup | "What does LK Chem actually do?" | Places unknown company in the supply chain taxonomy |
| Scenario Analysis | "If China restricts fluorspar, what breaks?" | Full cascade with timeline and exposure matrix |
| Chemistry Chain | "Trace hafnium from mine to fab" | 8-step tier-by-tier tracing with CAS lookups |
| Market Sizing | "What's the CMP slurry market breakdown?" | Top-down + bottom-up + trade data cross-check |
| Discovery | "Who else makes PAGs?" | Inverted search: find unknown suppliers by material, not name |
| Signal Detection | "Any early signals in CMP slurry supply?" | Scans filings, qualifications, and capex in five languages |
- Claude Code or OpenClaw
- Git
git clone https://github.com/lboquillon/chipchain.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -sfn "$(pwd)/chipchain" ~/.claude/skills/chipchain
claudeThen ask: /chipchain Who supplies CMP slurry to TSMC?
macOS / Linux:
git clone https://github.com/lboquillon/chipchain.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -sfn "$(pwd)/chipchain" ~/.claude/skills/chipchain
claude # start a new sessionWindows (PowerShell as Administrator):
git clone https://github.com/lboquillon/chipchain.git
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills" -Force | Out-Null
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills\chipchain" -Target "$(Get-Location)\chipchain"
claude # start a new sessionWindows (CMD as Administrator):
git clone https://github.com/lboquillon/chipchain.git
if not exist "%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills" mkdir "%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills"
mklink /D "%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\chipchain" "%CD%\chipchain"
claudeNote: Windows symlinks require Administrator privileges, or Developer Mode enabled in Settings > For Developers.
/chipchain Who supplies CMP slurry to TSMC?
Or just ask naturally, the skill triggers on semiconductor supply chain questions automatically.
Try these:
Who supplies photoacid generators for EUV resist?If China restricts fluorspar exports, what breaks?Trace hafnium from mine to TSMC's fabWhat's the CMP slurry market breakdown?What does Toyo Gosei actually make and why does it matter?Who else makes PAGs besides Toyo Gosei?Any early signals in the CMP slurry supply chain?
If you already have OpenClaw installed:
git clone https://github.com/lboquillon/chipchain.git ~/.openclaw/skills/chipchain
openclaw gateway restartOr install from ClawHub:
clawhub install chipchainAdd a company: Edit the relevant language entity file ({lang}/entities.md). Include name (English + native script), ticker, products, confidence level.
Fix a term: Edit the relevant language briefing file ({lang}/briefing.md). Verify against actual industry press, not dictionary translation.
Add a source: Edit the relevant language search file ({lang}/search.md) for country-specific sources, or sources.md for universal/cross-border sources.
MIT
Built by Leonardo Boquillon. Contributions welcome.
chipchain is part of a broader semiconductor supply chain intelligence effort built around Investmap:
- Investmap Supply Chain Network: Interactive network graph tracing supplier relationships between semiconductor companies. Visualize who supplies what to whom across the entire chain.
- How Chips Are Made: Step-by-step visual guide to the semiconductor manufacturing process, from wafer fabrication to packaging and test.
- Company Directory: Searchable directory of semiconductor supply chain companies with products, tickers, and supply chain positioning.
- Leo in AI (Substack): Writing about AI, semiconductor supply chains, and the tools being built to make them transparent.