Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Lam Research gets into the booming ALD business and doubles their install base

 Yesterday Lam Research was covered in an in a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference. Here is a full playback as a webcast for those interested. For all you ALD guys the interesting stuff come in the last minute. Lam Research usually not talk a lot about ALD but here they came with an interesting statement.

Joe Moore from Morgan Stanley, semiconductor group asked Douglas R. Bettinger, chief financial officer of Lam Research about their ALD progress. "... we are very pleased with the progress we are making in atomic level deposition as well as the atomic level etch, which was the topic of Rick Gottscho, our head of global products talk at SPIE last week. I think we described exactly a doubling of the installed base last year in ALD; multiple customers. It's an ALD Oxide tool. Very pleased with our performance here. Three years ago, we didn't have any business in ALD and now we've got a meaningful amount of revenue coming from it."
Doug Bettinger is chief financial officer of Lam Research.(Lamresearch.com)
The ALD oxide tool is most probably the Vector - a multi-chamber or rather a multi-station tool within a single vacuum chamber. So it is not Spatial like Tuomo Suntolas first one, the new Applied Materials Olympia or the Jusung Engineering tools it is normal temporal ALD.




VECTOR® Product Family Technology: Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD), Plasma-Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) . (Lamresearch.com)

Here is a note on that SPIE 2016 plenary talk by Richard Gottsch.
Minimizing process-induced variability

"Richard Gottscho, Executive Vice President of Global Products at Lam Research Corp., followed up with a talk about minimizing the process-induced variability in multiple patterning. He extolled the benefits of plasma deposition and etching, including anisotropic etching, much smoother sidewalls, thinner lines, and much smaller via holes."

"But plasma processing does create problems, he said, requiring a new process, atomic layer processing, that he called the penultimate solution to variability reduction -- "penultimate" because much work still needs to be done. "

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