Applied Materials, the largest producer of chip making equipment, announced today that it has created a new generation of machines that will be able to deposit thin layers of atoms on tiny chips.
At the Semicon West trade show in San Francisco, Applied Materials unveiled its Applied Centura Integrated Gate Stack system that can create the tiny electrical circuitry on chips that will be made in the next few years. This kind of machine is the sort of modern miracle that is required for the chip industry -- the foundation of everything electronic -- to keep humming along on the pace of Moore's Law.
Moore's Law, first observed by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore, holds that the number of components on a chip doubles every two years. That law has held up for more than 45 years and governs the pace of progress in chips.
Steve Ghanayem, vice president and general manager of Metal Deposition, Front End and Atomic Layer Deposition Products at Applied Materials, said in an interview that the new Centura system will help keep the industry on the path of Moore's Law, allowing the placement of atoms on a dielectric film stack at the core of a 22-nanometer transistor gate. (A transistor is a core electrical switch in a chip and its circuits will soon be only 22 nanometers wide; a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
The problem when you're making chips at the nanoscopic level is that it's easy for a few atoms to get out of place, playing havoc with the reliability of a structure built on that scale. The Centura machine has a precisely controlled interface that allows it to place atoms accurately.
Ghanayem says Applied's new machine is the only tool available that can process the entire high-k multilayer stack in a single vacuum environment. That's critical to making a transistor that can operate at the fastest speeds, so it is critical to making really fast chips that go into computers and graphics subsystems.
The Applied Materials Centura Integrated Gate Stack system can deposit layers that are less than 3 nanometers in depth – about half the thickness of the outer membrane of a living cell. It can do so a fraction of a layer at a time with uniform application across an entire silicon wafer. (A wafer is a disk that is processed in a factory and then sliced into chips.)
As the thin films between the chip layers become thinner, the interfaces between adjacent layers are now more critical, Ghanayem said. Those interfaces now take up 50 percent of the thickness. By making the entire set of layers in a vacuum, the machine can make the structures with much more precision and fewer contaminants. This can boost transistor performance by 12 percent, and the variability between transistors can be reduced up to 40 percent. The result is faster, higher-value chips.
“Tomorrow’s nanoscale transistors require incredible precision because films just a few atoms thick will determine device performance,” said Ghanayem. “By combining multiple adjacent processing steps on our world-class Centura platform, we can simplify customers’ process flows and help them achieve high production yields of their next-generation logic chips.”
Chips are getting more and more complex over time, and it takes one breakthrough after another to keep them on the path of Moore's Law. The advance comes just a week after Applied Materials announced what it called a “breakthrough” technology in manufacturing chips that could become critical for continued technological progress in electronics for years to come.
The advance comes in a category of chip-making equipment called “rapid thermal processing,” or RTP. That involves heating a chip material to levels of heat similar to that of a jet engine within a very short period of time. While it seems arcane, it could enable chip designers to continue creating chips that are faster, better, and smaller. And those chips are the building blocks of all future electronic devices, from smartphones to gaming consoles. To break that down further, without advances like this, you won’t have supercomputing power to deliver advanced 3D apps on your smartphone in the future.
ASMi is Applied's rival in this market.