As companies like TSMC and Intel push current production technologies to their limits, new materials and more advanced chemistries will play an increasingly important role in the chip manufacturing industry, chain executives said.
Executives from Entegris and Merck spoke to Japanese media about how the global chip race is evolving as Moore's Law, the premise that transistors will continue to shrink and chips become more powerful, slows down.
James O, CTO of Entegris, an American chip materials manufacturer'When it comes to enabling advanced production processes, it's no longer chip making machines that take center stage, but advanced materials and cleaning solutions, Neill said.
Thirty years ago, everything was about lithography equipment to make the transistors on the chip smaller and improve the performance of the device," O'Neill said. Photolithography refers to the key chip manufacturing process that prints integrated circuits onto chips. The level of detail with which the machine prints these circuits usually determines how advanced the chip is. "Today, I see the statement that material innovation is the main driver of improved performance is solid," the CTO added.
Kai Beckmann, CEO of Merck's electronics business, echoed the same sentiment. "We're moving from the last two decades when [chip manufacturing] tools were most important for advancing technology to the next decade, which is what our customers call the age of materials," Beckman said. Tools are still important, but now the material is everything. ”
Beckman said this is a pivotal moment not only for processors and other logic chips, the so-called brains of electronic devices, but also for memory chips, including dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and 3D NAND flash memory.
For processor chips, the race to mass produce 2nm nodes by 2025 has begun, with giants such as TSMC, Samsung, and Intel leading the way. Depending on various development roadmaps, more complex chips may also be on the horizon.
At the same time, memory chip giants such as Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron are climbing to new heights with 3D NAND flash memory, with the goal of eventually producing chips with up to 500 layers. The three companies currently produce more than 230 layers of chips and are working on producing more than 300 layers of NAND within one to two years. Chips with more layers are considered more advanced because they offer greater storage capacity. 3D DRAM technology is also evolving.
Further advancements in these two areas require not only advanced tools, but also entirely new libraries of cutting-edge materials. For example, logic chip production jumped to 2nm, requiring entirely new chip architectures. In this new configuration, called Ring Gate (GAA), transistors are stacked in a more complex three-dimensional manner than earlier planar configurations.
o'Neill likens the application of chemicals to 3D transistors to something akin to "spraying paint on New York City from ***." You need material properties that control the top of the building, the sides of the building, and the street height. You need to make sure that you have the kind of uniformity you need to be able to clean up the streets after you're done. ”o'Developing materials for new transistor configurations, such as ring gates, requires innovative materials to "coat the top, bottom and sides evenly," Neill said, adding that the industry is engineering ways to do this "at the atomic scale."
Another aspect in which chemicals are becoming increasingly important is ensuring consistent quality. o'According to Neill, production yield, which is the percentage of functional chips produced in a given batch, becomes extremely important to determine which vendors are commercially competitive. High-purity chemistries are essential to ensure flawless production and minimize defects.
Merck's Beckman gave another example of the evolution of materials in the industry: copper is widely used as a conductive layer in current chip manufacturing processes, but in order to make smaller, more advanced chips, the industry is exploring new materials such as molybdenum. "You need a whole new set of materials to make the nodes of the cutting-edge chips smaller," he said.
Continuous innovation doesn't come cheap. International Business Strategies, a chip industry consultancy, estimates that a single 2nm wafer costs up to $30,000, which is 50% higher than the previous generation, the 3nm advanced processor used in the iPhone 15 Pro. A 2nm semiconductor manufacturing facility can produce 50,000 wafers per month (WSPM) at a cost of about $28 billion. That's $8 billion more than the cost of a 3nm fab.
Chip material manufacturers**, with strong support from countries such as the United States, China, Europe, Japan and India, will continue to scale up, and the huge cost of chips is one of the reasons driving onshore semiconductor production. It's not easy for latecomers to get into this race, and today's frontrunners aren't expected to drop out.
Bertrand Loy, CEO of Entegris said: "This is a highly capital-intensive industry. I expect the same forces to move forward. Big companies are only going to get stronger, and they'll be willing to keep investing because that's going to be their competitive advantage.
Disclaimer: This article was created by the original author. The content of the article is its personal point of view, we only share and discuss, does not mean that we agree or agree, if you have any objections, please contact the background.