Materials to Systems in Semiconductor Manufacturing and Beyond

Materials engineering, the ability to manipulate materials with atomic control on an industrial scale is the foundation for semiconductor technology innovations. It spans materials creation, modification, removal and analysis. Materials engineering is now being combined with integrated processing, co-optimization, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based actionable insight to accelerate new breakthroughs in semiconductor technology. Integrated process and co-optimization can augment unit process technology to provide new and unprecedented capabilities and significantly speed up process development and time to market. Big data and AI can be leveraged to improve process margin and repeatability, tool performance matching and uptime, and fabrication yield, while reducing variability. For VLSI semiconductor manufacturing, a Materials-to-Systems™ strategy can encompass concurrent innovations in materials, structures, architectures, and advanced packaging coupled with integrated process solutions, actionable insight acceleration and More-than-Moore technologies to drive improvements in PPACt™ (performance, power, area-cost and time-to-market) through the entire VLSI ecosystem. Materials engineering coupled with a Materials-to-Systems™ strategy is also key to addressing multiple global inflections in markets as diverse as Life Sciences, Pharma, Sustainable Energy, Optics and Displays.