The past two years have seen a significant decline in the number of venture firms making new investments in the Energy Technology and Semiconductor sectors. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for private companies raising capital in these sectors.

Increasingly, corporate investors are playing a critical role in financing companies in these sectors, with 54% of energy tech and 24% of semiconductor private financing rounds in 2012 including one or more corporate investors¹.

As the funding for energy tech and semiconductor startups from traditional financing sources has weakened, Applied Ventures continues to be a strong supporter of new thinking that will drive these sectors.

Read More

Epitaxy is one of the fundamental processes used to make all kinds of semiconductor devices: LEDs, power electronics and, of course, microchips.

Epitaxy was first used in chipmaking to grow ultrapure silicon films – the starting point for making high-performance CMOS transistors. Today, we use epitaxy for a whole lot more.

Read More

Below is a short excerpt of an article I submitted to IEEE Spectrum that looks at the emerging memory technologies being considered to help smartphones and tablets meet the demand for more energy efficient data storage. To access the complete article, visit the IEEE Spectrum web site.

"Our smartphones and ultrathin laptops rely on a triumvirate of memory technologies—SRAM, DRAM, and flash—each customized for a specific purpose. They’ve all been fabulous workhorses, but now these memories are struggling to keep up with the steady demand for chips that are faster, cheaper, more reliable, and more energy efficient.

Read More

When it comes to microchip technology, transistors seem to get all the attention. But did you know that the transistor layer only makes up 10% of a modern logic chip?

The other 90% is made up of interconnect layers – the three-dimensional maze of copper wires that make connections between all those transistors and the outside world. From a volume perspective, that makes the dielectric insulator that supports all that copper the most important material in all of chipmaking!

Read More

Chipmaking is arguably the most complex manufacturing operation in human history. To illustrate this:

• A modern megafab – one that processes over a million wafers a year – contains hundreds of individual machines and turns out billions of finished chips a year
• It can take over 750 individual process steps to make a modern microprocessor
• The number of different types of chips being made simultaneously is growing while adding more layers to each one. As technology continues to progress the size of the chips are shrinking and manufacturing constraints are increasing

How is this complexity handled? By computers, of course, using a similarly complex piece of software called a manufacturing execution system (MES) which keeps track of every machine and every wafer in the fab.

At Applied Materials, we’ve taken software automation to the next level. Our SmartSched software doesn’t just react to changing fab conditions; it peers into the future. This video shows how it works.

Read More