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#BREAKING: Applied Materials
$AMAT Introduced Two New Chipmaking Systems Designed to Solve One of the Biggest Challenges in Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing.
What was announced:
โ Applied Materials
$AMAT introduced two new systems: the Centris Spectral SiN ALD and the Producer Selectra Mo Etch.
โ Both systems were announced alongside the 2026 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits.
The problem they solve:
โ Modern AI chips increasingly rely on stacking structures vertically rather than simply shrinking them horizontally.
โ As these structures become deeper and narrower, it becomes much harder to coat materials evenly or remove materials precisely throughout the entire structure.
โ Existing manufacturing tools are increasingly challenged by these requirements.
โ Variability in these processes can reduce electrical performance and lower manufacturing yields.
โ Both new systems are designed to address this challenge from different angles.
Centris Spectral SiN ALD:
โ Silicon nitride is a key insulating material used throughout the chip manufacturing process.
โ It is used for surface protection, electrical isolation, and as a spacer during patterning.
โ The material must be deposited at low temperatures while remaining durable enough to withstand later manufacturing steps.
โ Conventional plasma-enhanced deposition struggles to uniformly coat high-aspect-ratio structures.
โ The Centris Spectral SiN ALD uses high-density microwave plasma technology to deposit high-quality silicon nitride uniformly inside tall, narrow structures.
โ The system is designed to achieve this at low temperatures while avoiding the tradeoff between plasma density and ion-induced damage.
โ In gate-all-around transistors, the system can create high-quality liners for transistor contacts that reduce electrical resistance and capacitance.
โ Lower resistance and capacitance can enable faster device performance.
โ Applications extend across advanced logic and DRAM manufacturing.
โ The system is part of Applied Materials' new Spectral ALD platform.
โ The platform features a quad-reactor design, precision chemical delivery, and support for both temporal and spatial ALD operation.
โ Applied Materials said the system is being adopted by leading chipmakers.
Producer Selectra Mo Etch:
โ 3D NAND memory chips store data by stacking memory cells vertically, often across hundreds of layers.
โ Molybdenum is increasingly being used for the wordlines that connect those memory cells.
โ To prevent electrical shorts, the metal must be removed precisely from the spaces between adjacent wordlines.
โ Conventional wet etch processes struggle to remove material evenly throughout the full depth of these structures.
โ The Producer Selectra Mo Etch uses an engineered dry gas process to achieve uniform top-to-bottom molybdenum removal across the full stack.
โ Applied Materials said the system has already been validated in high-volume manufacturing.
โ The system reduces cell-to-cell variability.
โ It lowers leakage current.
โ It improves data retention.
โ Applied Materials also said the technology creates opportunities beyond 3D NAND, including DRAM and foundry logic applications.
What Applied Materials says:
โ Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials, stated: "As the industry pushes the limits of AI computing, the biggest opportunities are increasingly found in materials engineering. From transistor structures to memory stacks, chipmakers need new ways to precisely deposit and selectively remove materials in extremely complex 3D architectures."