tag: Applied Materials

Beam Me Up
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus For years, electron-beam tools have been struggling to keep up with photomask complexity, causing an alarming increase in write times and mask production costs. Intel and others recently warned that e-beams soon could reach their fundamental limits, thereby requiring the need for new solutions. And in the multiple patterning era, mask makers could see their capital costs soa... » read more

Mask Repair Enters The Spotlight
By Ed Sperling - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus For years, the biggest challenges in photomask manufacturing have revolved around the slow write times for electron-beam tools and soaring mask inspection costs. Now, photomask repair, a sometimes forgotten technology in the mask shop, is in the spotlight and turning into the clash of the titans. Mask repair involves the process of finding defects on a photomask and repairin... » read more

Epitaxy: Seeking Crystalline Perfection
By Applied Materials Writers - 18 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Richard Lewington Epitaxy is one of the fundamental processes used to make all kinds of semiconductor devices: LEDs, power electronics and, of course, microchips. The term epitaxy means, roughly speaking, “adding order” and that’s exactly what it does. Hot gases react on a surface to “grow” a layer that precisely matches the underlying crystal structure. Epitaxy was first us... » read more

NAND Enters Tough Cycle
By Ed Sperling - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The NAND flash memory market is entering into a new and painful cycle, a period that will impact suppliers, OEMs and fab tool vendors alike. For some time, there has been an oversupply and depressed pricing in the NAND market. In mid-2011, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix and Toshiba put on the brakes in their capital spending plans. And in recent months, NAND suppliers in total h... » read more

The Rolling Stones Of Chipmaking
By Applied Materials Writers - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Knepfler In 1993, when the Internet was mostly a science experiment, Applied shipped a new P5000 CVD system to the Motorola SPS (now Freescale) Oak Hill fab in Austin, Texas— where it was used to produce processors for Apple computers. A year later, Motorola installed its second P5000 system. Fast forward 20 years and you’ll find both tools on the production line and still runnin... » read more

Universal Memories Fall Back To Earth
By Ed Sperling - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Ten years ago, Intel Corp. declared that flash memory would stop scaling at 65nm, prompting the need for a new replacement technology. Thinking the end was near for flash, a number of companies began to develop various next-generation memory types, such as 3D chips, FeRAM, MRAM, phase-change memory (PCM), and ReRAM. Many of these technologies were originally billed as “uni... » read more

G450C To Align Vendors During 450mm Transition
By Ed Sperling - 16 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Innovation and synchronization among multiple companies do not often go hand in hand. But for the 450mm wafer transition to provide its full benefits, chip makers and their suppliers will need to do more than a simple wafer size scale up. That may lead the Global 450 Consortium (G450C) to serve as the proving ground for efforts to more closely match the electrical results o... » read more

What’s After NAND Flash?
By Ed Sperling - 16 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus For years, many have predicted the end of flash memory scaling, particularly NAND, but the technology continues to defy the odds as it moves down the process curve. Still, there are signs that the floating gate structure in today’s flash memory is on its last legs. The floating gate is seeing an undesirable reduction in the control gate to capacitive coupling ratio. And ... » read more

Flowing Copper
By Applied Materials Writers - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Richard Lewington If you were to slice up a microchip and take a look (you’d need a really powerful microscope, I'm afraid) you would see what looks like a nanoscale layer cake. All the active circuit elements—transistors, memory cells, etc.—are on the bottom. The other 90% of the chip is a maze of tiny copper wires, which we call interconnects. The history of chip developme... » read more

Capping Tools Tame Electromigration
By Mark LaPedus - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The shift towards the 28nm node and beyond has put the spotlight back on the interconnect in semiconductor manufacturing. In chip scaling, the big problem in the interconnect is resistance-capacitance (RC). Another, and sometimes forgotten, issue is electromigration. “Electromigration gets worse in device scaling,” said Daniel Edelstein, an IBM Fellow and manager of BE... » read more

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