Built from the atom up
Epitaxy's defining role in the AI age
Steven Reiter, Corporate VP, Head of Plasma and Epitaxy, discusses ASM's growing leadership in epitaxy.
AI is changing our world. From image recognition and generation to medical diagnostics, entertainment, and software, AI capabilities have advanced rapidly in recent years. New AI products and services are driving data center growth through higher content servers, while AI-enhanced edge devices, from smartphones to auto and home appliances, are continuing to scale. The result is surging demand for computing power, high-speed HBM, and faster, larger data storage, all of which require semiconductor logic and memory devices with higher speed and lower energy usage.
Materials-driven scaling
Design and architecture alone can no longer solve this challenge. As scaling becomes harder, progress increasingly depends on the discovery of new materials and new ways to control them at the atomic level.
This is where ASM plays a defining role. By enabling new materials, new architectures, and atomic-level control in volume production, ASM underpins the advances that make AI performance, efficiency, and reliability possible.
Generation after generation, leading-edge technologies require more single-wafer epitaxy (Epi) process steps in the densest areas of the device, creating increasing opportunities for ASM tools across additional process steps. New materials are being developed and deposited with ASM Epi, with better control and conformality, to enable the devices of tomorrow.
Epitaxy at the heart of next-generation scaling
High-quality epitaxy films of silicon (Si), silicon germanium (SiGe), silicon germanium boron (SiGeB), and silicon phosphorus (SiP) play a key role in device performance, enhancing electron mobility, enabling faster transistor switching at lower power, and delivering precisely the electrical conductivity required through controlled dopant concentrations.
The importance of epitaxy is growing as the industry scales. The transition to gate-all-around (GAA) technology is a pivotal moment: GAA transistors rely on an epitaxial superlattice of as many as eight to ten silicon and silicon -germanium layers, along with new epitaxial contact layers selectively grown bottom up. For 3D -DRAM, the superlattice is expected to be even taller, starting at around 64 layers and scaling quickly beyond that.
ASM's innovations in Epi
This level of layer complexity demands breakthroughs in process control. Temperature control is one of the most critical factors, and ASM has advanced the state of the art in our epitaxy tools.
Our Intrepid® ES™ and Intrepid® ESA™ tools utilize an isothermal chamber alongside our proprietary Turino™ CL, a direct temperature measurement and feedback system that monitors and manages wafer temperature with high precision. Unlike approaches that measure susceptor temperature and infer wafer temperature from it, Turino™ CL uses multiple pyrometers to directly measure the temperature at the top surface of the wafer, delivering a higher-performance control loop. This translates into:
- Better thickness uniformity control
- Faster ramps for higher productivity
- Lower energy consumption
It enables thickness control one monolayer at a time, a critical advantage in GAA nanosheet applications and a foundation for the increasingly complex epitaxial structures that scaling demands.
The road ahead
Epi represents one of ASM's most important growth markets for at least the next five years. We have focused our R&D investment on these technologies. As device architectures grow more complex and materials become the defining factor in scaling, ASM's deep expertise in materials discovery and atomic-level process control positions us to enable the next generation of semiconductor performance.
