Because these contacts form the smallest connections between interconnects and transistors, maintaining low resistance is crucial to ensuring maximum chip performance and energy efficiency.
Spectral represents a new series of ALD tools featuring a quad-reactor design with precise chemical delivery, a range of plasma and thermal processing capabilities, and hardware for both temporal and spatial ALD operation. This configuration enables the production of a wide variety of layers for AI chips. The Spectral system is used by manufacturers of logic chips with process nodes of 2 nm and below.
According to Applied Materials, enabling more powerful AI requires innovations that extend beyond transistors. As scaling moves below 2 nm, the metal contacts that connect each transistor to the wiring network become increasingly thinner. This contributes to the chip’s overall resistance and creates a bottleneck for performance and energy efficiency. At these nanoscale dimensions, conventional tungsten contacts are reaching their limits. Molybdenum — a metal that can be made thinner without impairing electron flow — has emerged as an alternative for next-generation contacts at angstrom-class nodes.