In 2020, the Applied Materials Community Affairs team embarked on a year-long journey to evaluate our U.S.-based work in communities of color. This included conducting an Equity Audit examining our personal beliefs as well as our work’s programs and practices. In this blog, I discuss key learnings from the audit and the initial steps we are taking to evolve our program.

Season's Greetings to all of our readers and wishing you a wonderful 2022! Click to view our holiday video.

To enable a more sustainable semiconductor industry, new fabs must be designed to maximize output while reducing energy consumption and emissions. In this blog post, I examine Applied Materials’ efforts to drive fab sustainability through the process equipment we develop for chipmakers. It all starts with an evolution in the mindset of how these systems are designed.

For many centuries, optical technologies have utilized the same principles and components to bend and manipulate light. Now, another strategy to control light—metasurface optics or flat optics—is moving out of academic labs and heading toward commercial viability.

The patterning challenges of today’s most advanced logic and memory chips can be solved with a new playbook that takes the industry from optical target-based approximation to actual, on-device measurements; limited statistical sampling to massive, across-wafer sampling; and single-layer patterning control to integrative multi-layer control. Applied’s new PROVision® 3E system is designed to enable this new playbook.

As the semiconductor industry increasingly moves from simple 2D chip designs to complex 3D designs based on multipatterning and EUV, patterning control has reached an inflection point. The optical overlay tools and techniques the semiconductor industry traditionally used to reduce errors are simply not precise enough for today’s leading-edge logic and memory chips.

Any efforts focused on increasing the next generation of diverse women in STEM must include holistic support for girls and their families. 

Part of our strategy to foster a meaningful Culture of Inclusion at Applied includes focused efforts to advance the careers of women engineers through networking, mentorships, individual development planning, conference participation, and professional skill development workshops.

At the Applied Materials Master Class today, we highlight two fast-growing and highly enabling areas of the semiconductor industry. “ICAPS” silicon powers billions of new devices on the edge—including electric vehicles. No longer an afterthought, packaging now enables the benefits associated with Moore’s Law to continue even as 2D scaling slows. Today’s class demonstrates that the AI Era requires innovation across a wide range of technologies, from the edge to the cloud.