Semiconductors

In 2020, only seven suppliers in the entire Intel supply chain earned an Intel SCQI Award, making them truly the best of the best. Applied’s recognition includes distinguished performance in supplier diversity.

Applied Materials is reinventing process control with a new solution, unveiled today, that uses Big Data and AI to find yield-killing defects better, faster and more cost effectively than legacy approaches. The solution allows chipmakers to accelerate yields and time to market of semiconductor process technologies and fabs. 

This is the second blog in a series examining challenges around defect detection and correction. Here, I describe the ideal process control solution for the AI Era and discuss what it will take to make it a reality.

Getting from R&D to high-volume manufacturing of new technology nodes is a complex process gated primarily by the ability to detect and correct defects. The methods used by the industry to perform defect inspection and review have remained relatively the same for decades. It is now time for a new approach—one that is optimized for the AI Era.

2020 will be remembered most for the challenges of COVID-19. In the world of technology, it will be remembered for accelerating digital transformations that would have taken many more years to play out. Entering 2021, the dependency between the global economy and semiconductors is greater than it’s ever been. At the same time, the way chips are being made is changing as traditional Moore’s Law scaling slows. Applied Materials is dedicated to driving new ways to help our customers continue to deliver improvements in chip power, performance and cost, in record time.

Selective processing is increasingly being used to create, shape and modify materials and features in semiconductor manufacturing. In this blog I explain what selective processing is and why it’s critically important to the future of chip scaling.

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.

Applied’s newest Integrated Materials Solution solves the challenge of selective tungsten deposition, enabling simultaneous improvements in chip power, performance and area/cost (PPAC) in the most advanced foundry-logic nodes.