With the advent of artificial intelligence and the era of big data, chips must continue to scale up and improve performance. How to produce more efficient, less power-efficient, smaller-area, low-cost chips below the 10-nanometer process becomes the main current semiconductor process. Topics.
According to the explanation of applied materials, in the PC era, the crystal structure of the chip is mainly planar, rare integrated materials are used, and microlithography is used for chip micro-reduction, so that the performance of the chip can be improved and power consumption can be reduced, but with the As the era progressed to mobile communications, the customer began to self-align the pattern paintings, self-aligned quadruple pattern paintings, and continued the use of extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) to continue to shrink, chip performance gains began to slow down, and cost efficiency also decreased.
With the pace of Moore's Law, the state-of-the-art semiconductor process has now reached the 7-nanometer level, but as the chip continues to shrink, some conductive materials such as tungsten and copper have been unable to shrink smoothly below the 10-nanometer process. In nature, the process of transistor contact and local terminal metal wire has approached the physical limit, and the original tungsten and copper can no longer be imported into the interface. This has also become a bottleneck for the performance of fin transistors (FinFET).
Applied materials point out that cobalt metal can eliminate this bottleneck, and the technology that uses cobalt metal as a conductor turns the corner and Moore's Law continues to move downwards. Currently, cobalt has been verified to be suitable for mass production, and cobalt appears to be low at a narrow pitch. Resistive characteristics effectively improve power consumption, allowing material engineering to continue to shrink, and the highly optimized deposition, tempering, and planarization processes provided by the application materials can reduce costs and improve yield.
In fact, TSMC has a close cooperation relationship with TSMC. At present, almost all key equipment and materials for TSMC's advanced manufacturing processes are supplied by application materials. Therefore, as TSMC process continues to shrink, application materials will continue to benefit.