Applied Materials Announces Metal Change For Transistor Contact, Interconnect

(RTTNews) - Applied Materials, Inc. (AMAT) announced chip designers can now replace tungsten and copper with cobalt to increase performance by up to 15% as the company's unique Integrated Materials Solution combines dry clean, PVD, ALD and CVD on the Endura platform, enabling customers to speed the adoption of cobalt. Applied's integrated cobalt suite is now shipping to foundry/logic customers worldwide.

"Five years ago, Applied anticipated an inflection in the transistor contact and interconnect, and we began developing an alternative materials solution that could take us beyond the 10nm node. As we enter the big data and AI era, there will be more of these inflections, and we are excited to be having earlier and deeper collaborations with our customers to accelerate their roadmaps and enable devices we never dreamed possible," said Prabu Raja, senior vice president of Applied's Semiconductor Products Group.

While challenging to integrate, cobalt brings significant benefits to chips and chip making: lower resistance and variability at small dimensions; improved gapfill at very fine dimensions; and improved reliability.