BALD Engineering - Born in Finland, Born to ALD: Tuomo Suntola - Overview on Atomic Layer Deposition & Thin Film Devices

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Tuomo Suntola - Overview on Atomic Layer Deposition & Thin Film Devices

Riikka Puurunen has pointed to this new updated web page by Dr. Tuomo Suntola, the Finnish inventor of ALD: Suntola - ALD Technology

So why should you spend time studying this page and the material collected there you may wonder. It contains an fantastic overview of important publications and recent presentations that Dr. Suntola has made and the most important reference articles on ALD from the Finnish ALD companies, engineers and researchers. I think it is very much to learn here for people new in the field but also for all you experts like me that has entered this field of exiting ALD at the beginning om the millennium when ALD was introduced in the semiconductor business. For those of the more curious nature - please join us in the VPHA Project to learn more about the intriguing history of ALD (VPHA Blog)?

Dr. Suntola [ALD Inventor] first industrial work was “Humicap®” thin film humidity sensor for Vaisala Oy (1973) which still, almost 40 years later holds the world market leader’s position in humidity sensing (http://www.sci.fi/~suntola/biography.html) [screen dump from video]

I think that we all today have to thank Suntola and his co-workers like Sven Lindfors (below) and others for making all this possible. Just think about it - would we all today enjoy living and working in a fast growing technological field of ALD without this work that started in the 70´s and persisted through until it went global in the 90´s and beyond until today? Today Dr. Tuomo Suntola is Member Board of Directors and Sven Lindfors is Chief Technology Officer at Picosun Oy one of Finlands successful ALD Exporting companies.

Sven Lindfors in 1978 next to the flow-type ALD reactor in which the successful H₂S/ZnCl₂ process was demonstrated.

Here is the situation today in the Semiconductor ALD Equipment market:

In total, the ALD tool market for semiconductor applications is projected to reach $1.2 billion over the next three to four years, up from $600 million in 2014, according to ASM International (September 2015).

In 2014, ASMI was the leader in the ALD tool market with a 53% share, followed in order by TEL (27%), Jusung (6%), Lam Research (5%), Wonik IPS (5%) and Aixtron (2%), [...] According to Gartner (September, 2015)

[Please observe that Gartner here do not report Kokusai revenue, who can probably claim a top position for their Large Batch ALD business, Information from : http://semiengineering.com/ald-market-heats-up/]

How big the other markets (R&D, Barrier, MEMS, Cleantech, Bio, ...) are is unknown to me ut you just have to add the revenue of he other ALD companies and ALD business units to figure that out (Picosun, BENEQ, Ultratech/CNT, Oxford Instruments, ...). However it doen´t stop there, adding to this the ALD precursor market is also growing at a steady pace for each node when more an more ALD process steps are being added and also transferred from being typical CVD and PVD layers. It is smaller than the equipment market but it is in the same order of magnitude - maybe half the size.

Here is a selsction of presentations - please visit the page for the complete collection!

T. Suntola, "ALD - Material Buildup by Atomic Layers", 5th International Workshop on Applications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (IWANN-5), Bilkent University - UNAM, Ankara 15-26 June 2015 Presentation, ppsx