“Materials will play a huge role in scaling going forward”

As simple as it may seem, the gate oxide in modern chips is a marvel of engineering that took years, if not decades, to perfect. The nanofilm is an example of what chipmakers call a functional material. Chips traditionally also contain passive or structural materials, whose function is limited to insulation or structural support. But, according to Vamsi Paruchuri, that distinction is rapidly disappearing. “As devices shrink, every material in the device is becoming functional,” says the Corporate VP of Technology, Innovation and Market Research at ASM.

The implications for Paruchuri’s firm are profound. Every additional functional material creates another critical deposition step, another interface that must be engineered and another process window that has to be controlled with atomic precision. Rather than being confined to a handful of high-value layers such as the gate stack, technologies like atomic layer deposition (ALD) and epitaxy are steadily moving deeper into the chip, into memory and increasingly into advanced packaging as well.