Looking to meet these needs, the company has introduced the Olympia system, which is said to bring the flexibility needed to allow low temperature, high quality films to engineered and deposited precisely.
David Chu, senior director of strategic marketing, dielectric systems and modules, said demand was growing strongly and that he expected the market for ALD technology to be worth $1billion in 2016.
"ALD was all about thickness control in the past," he claimed, "but now, as industry goes to 3D, conformality is also important. And, because 3D structures have active parts, manufacturers need better ALD."
Olympia has a modular architecture, which is said to enable a flexible and rapid process sequence. The modular design also separates chemistries completely, which eliminates the need for the pump and purge steps found in conventional ALD devices. With these steps removed, productivity can increase, with deposition time potentially halved. "Purge is not a value added step," Chu noted
"In Olympia," Chu explained, "chemistries are confined to vertical zones in the chamber. The wafer moves through these zones and is exposed to the various chemistries. The number of revolutions the wafer makes determines the layer thickness."
Chu also believes that Olympia will enable atomic level engineering. "It may open up new classes of films for high volume manufacturing. A lot of films are impractical on conventional ALD, but Olympia will open the door for customers to start thinking engineering films at the atomic level that are better than existing films. And it's not unrealistic to start thinking about thicker films," he concluded.
