The World's First Molybdenum Atomic Layer Deposition Equipment Debuts

At a time when the semiconductor industry is developing rapidly, every technological innovation serves as a powerful impetus for chip manufacturing. Recently, Lam Research, a giant in the field of semiconductor equipment, announced the official launch of the world's first molybdenum atomic layer deposition equipment ALTUS Halo. This news is analogous to a stone cast into a placid lake, generating ripples within the semiconductor industry. The equipment has been successfully used in the fields of logic semiconductors and 3D NAND, showing great application potential.

Looking back on the development of semiconductor technology, tungsten (W) has long dominated the key links such as the interconnection of metal-wiring components on chips. For quite a long time in the past, tungsten has played a pivotal role in the semiconductor manufacturing process with its excellent trench-filling ability. When the chip-manufacturing process was still in a less-advanced process stage, the requirements for metal-wiring materials were more focused on whether they could accurately and completely fill tiny trenches to ensure the stability of circuit connections. Tungsten is excellent in this regard. Its atomic-structure characteristics enable it to fill grooves in a highly ordered manner in complex chip microstructures, build a reliable physical-connection bridge for the intricate circuits inside the chip, and ensure the smooth transmission of electronic signals inside the chip, which has made great contributions to the early vigorous development of the semiconductor industry.

However, as semiconductor process technology continues to move towards a more sophisticated direction, Moore's Law continues to drive chips towards smaller sizes and higher integration. When the process technology enters the deep sub-micron era at the nanometer level, the disadvantage of tungsten's high resistance gradually emerges. In extremely small chip circuits, a slight increase in resistance will cause a significant increase in energy loss during signal transmission, which in turn affects the operating speed and energy efficiency of the chip. For example, in high-frequency and high-speed chip-computing scenarios, higher resistance will cause delays in the transmission of electronic signals in metal wiring, reducing the overall data-processing speed of the chip, and excessive energy loss will also be converted into heat, which will put great pressure on the chip's heat-dissipation system and may even cause chip over-heating failures, seriously restricting the further improvement of chip performance.

At this critical juncture, molybdenum stood out and became the new favorite of semiconductor wiring technology. Molybdenum exhibits excellent comprehensive performance in both trench filling and resistance. From the perspective of trench filling, molybdenum atoms have unique physical and chemical properties, which enable them to be filled into extremely fine trench structures in a precise and uniform manner under advanced atomic-layer deposition processes, meeting the stringent requirements of modern semiconductor processes for high-precision filling. At the same time, molybdenum has significantly lower resistance than tungsten, which means that under the same circuit conditions, electronic signals can achieve faster transmission speeds when passing through molybdenum wiring, greatly reducing signal delays and significantly improving the data-processing efficiency of chips. In addition, lower resistance can also effectively reduce energy loss and heat-generation problems, providing a strong guarantee for the stability of chips under high-performance operation, and providing new possibilities for the semiconductor industry to break through process bottlenecks and achieve technological leaps.

As a device specifically designed to inject molybdenum into semiconductors, ALTUS Halo has undoubtedly become the core "weapon" of this semiconductor-material innovation. It cleverly combines Lam Research's unique four-station module architecture with the latest advances in ALD (atomic-layer deposition) technology. The four-station module architecture brings an efficient production process to the equipment. Each site performs its own duties, and closely cooperates from wafer pre-processing, molybdenum-atom deposition to post-processing, greatly improving production efficiency and meeting the needs of large-scale semiconductor production. The new progress of ALD technology ensures that molybdenum atoms can be deposited layer by layer on the chip surface with atomic-level precision to form a high-quality, low-defect molybdenum metal layer. This engineered low-resistivity molybdenum deposition technology is exactly the key demand for emerging and future chip changes. Whether it is a thousand-layer 3D NAND, which needs to build a multi-layer storage structure in a limited space and has extremely high requirements for material filling and electrical properties; or 4F² DRAM, which pursues higher storage density and faster read and write speeds; or advanced GAA logic circuits, which have strict standards for precise circuit control and signal-transmission speed, the low-resistivity molybdenum deposition provided by ALTUS Halo has become an important support for achieving these technological breakthroughs.

Micron's vice president of NAND development spoke highly of this technological change. He pointed out that the integration of molybdenum metallization enables Micron to take the lead in launching industry-leading I/O bandwidth and storage capacity in the latest generation of NAND products. In today's era of data explosion, the demand for data-transmission speed and storage capacity of storage devices is growing exponentially. The application of molybdenum metallization may enable Micron's NAND products to achieve a qualitative leap in I/O bandwidth, enabling faster reading and writing of data, greatly improving the efficiency of data interaction between storage devices and external devices. At the same time, in terms of storage capacity, with the advantages of molybdenum materials under advanced process technology, Micron may be able to integrate more storage units in a limited chip space, significantly improving storage capacity.

With the launch of ALTUS Halo devices and the widespread application of molybdenum in the semiconductor field, the semiconductor industry is standing at a new technological crossroads. In the future, with the dual blessing of molybdenum elements and advanced equipment, semiconductor chips are likely to achieve greater breakthroughs in performance, power consumption, integration, etc., providing a more powerful "heart" for the development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things, and promoting the entire technology industry to new heights.

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