07.03.18
Applied Materials recently celebrated the 20th anniversary and 5,000th shipment of the Producer platform, a manufacturing system that helps make virtually every chip in the world, the company reported.
To date, 1.9 billion square meters of silicon has been processed by the Producer platform – an area equivalent to 30 times the size of Manhattan, according to Applied Materials.
The Producer platform was launched in July 1998 to help enable chips to run faster by changing their wiring from aluminum to copper, which is a better conductor. The transition was needed by the industry to drive the performance and power improvements associated with Moore’s Law, but it also required many additional steps that could have made the progress unaffordable.
As a result, the Producer platform became an industry workhorse that has since taken on more tasks to help drive Moore’s Law and enable mass adoption of electronic products including notebook PCs, smartphones and wearable electronics.
“With the landmark Producer platform, Applied achieved something that had never been done before on this scale: create a highly flexible architecture that can support multiple technology generations and still remain incredibly productive,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSIresearch. “Today, the Producer platform continues to allow chipmakers to imagine and build chips in entirely new ways.”
The Producer platform was originally conceived as a single process system focused on chemical vapor deposition. Over the years, Applied expanded the capabilities of the platform to include etch, selective removal and treatment technologies.
Today, more materials are reaching the physical limits of classic Moore’s Law scaling. In response, Applied is pioneering development of new materials beyond the periodic table that are more difficult to use but enable continued improvements in chip performance and power efficiency. The Producer platform can now be used as an integrated process platform, offering various combinations of deposition and treatment, deposition and etch, or deposition and selective removal, in the same system and under vacuum.
To date, 1.9 billion square meters of silicon has been processed by the Producer platform – an area equivalent to 30 times the size of Manhattan, according to Applied Materials.
The Producer platform was launched in July 1998 to help enable chips to run faster by changing their wiring from aluminum to copper, which is a better conductor. The transition was needed by the industry to drive the performance and power improvements associated with Moore’s Law, but it also required many additional steps that could have made the progress unaffordable.
As a result, the Producer platform became an industry workhorse that has since taken on more tasks to help drive Moore’s Law and enable mass adoption of electronic products including notebook PCs, smartphones and wearable electronics.
“With the landmark Producer platform, Applied achieved something that had never been done before on this scale: create a highly flexible architecture that can support multiple technology generations and still remain incredibly productive,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSIresearch. “Today, the Producer platform continues to allow chipmakers to imagine and build chips in entirely new ways.”
The Producer platform was originally conceived as a single process system focused on chemical vapor deposition. Over the years, Applied expanded the capabilities of the platform to include etch, selective removal and treatment technologies.
Today, more materials are reaching the physical limits of classic Moore’s Law scaling. In response, Applied is pioneering development of new materials beyond the periodic table that are more difficult to use but enable continued improvements in chip performance and power efficiency. The Producer platform can now be used as an integrated process platform, offering various combinations of deposition and treatment, deposition and etch, or deposition and selective removal, in the same system and under vacuum.