nanochip fab solutions

Manufacturers can turn periods of lower utilization to their benefit by using the available time to take proactive steps to increase the performance and productivity of their equipment and fab operations.

Compared with CMP for 300mm wafers, planarizing 200mm wafers with thick copper layers presented new challenges. Smaller polishing head zone sizes, much thicker bulk copper processes, and wafer edge issues added up to a demanding development process.

Factory automation increasingly depends on our ability to make complex decisions rapidly, but many semiconductor fabrication processes have exceeded the cognitive capabilities of humans to troubleshoot anomalies and assess all relevant variables. Thus, automation has become a key strategy used to address these challenges.

Moore’s Law follows the continual advancement of smaller silicon transistors, which is ideal for faster operating speeds in processors and increasing memory size density.

Applied Materials has led the way over the past few years in determining a big data analytics path for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. 

In an industry as demanding as semiconductor manufacturing, where globalization, capital investments, and technical complexity continue to accelerate, the availability of service parts inventory to ensure equipment availability is a critical success factor.

When Ellie Yieh, fresh out of the University of California at Berkeley’s chemical engineering program, joined Applied Materials 30 years ago, the semiconductor industry was poised to make a series of fundamental technology changes.