SEMICON West

Recently I participated in a fascinating panel discussion with experts from Arm, Google, Intel, Microsoft, UC Santa Barbara and VMware to explore how Big Data, AI and cloud computing can be used to help mitigate—rather than contribute to—climate change.

Watch the video replay of Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson’s keynote at SEMICON West to hear about new initiatives Applied is driving to enable a more sustainable company, industry and world.

Evolutionary changes in materials and device structures critical for next generation of device scaling.

Investors and entrepreneurs converged at the third annual Silicon Innovation Form at SEMICON West to pitch new technologies, collaborate with ecosystem partners and spark new innovations.

Innovation is alive and well in the semiconductor industry. That was a key takeaway from the strategic investor panel at the second annual Silicon Innovation Forum at SEMICON West, and one I can’t reinforce enough within the venture capital (VC) community.

In a couple weeks the semiconductor equipment industry will descend upon San Francisco, CA. for the annual SEMICON West event. Applied Materials executives will be front and center sharing industry and business outlooks, and providing their perspectives on the company’s strategies, opportunities, products and financial performance. Precision materials engineering will be the central theme as it continues to enable significant inflections in transistors and memory technology.

As a member of the organizing committee, I’m pleased to share that Applied Ventures will be participating in the second-annual Silicon Innovation Forum (SIF) held in conjunction with SEMICON West 2014 in San Francisco on Tuesday, July 8.The forum is designed to bring new and emerging innovators together with the semiconductor industry’s top strategic investors and venture capitalists (VCs), in order to enable closer collaboration and showcase the next generation of entrepreneurs in microelectronics.

SEMICON West is one of the most important events for the semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry and its suppliers. This week, Applied Materials' technologists will lead a series of discussions on advanced transistors, roll-to-roll manufacturing, the transition to 450mm, and strategic investing. Follow along below (and check back regularly!) for a snapshot of the most interesting conversations coming out of Semicon West from Applied Materials and other notable show attendees.

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 development is all about shrinking circuit features. When the transistors shrink, so must the interconnects. Today, the smallest interconnects can be  fewer than 200 atoms across.In this video, I take a quick look at how the interconnect fabrication process is done and then demonstrate how our revolutionary copper reflow technology works.