High-Throughput Experimentation Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) Chamber for Accelerated Microelectronics Materials Research and Development

The cost to maintain Moore’s law is growing exponentially with every generation of semiconductor device. To support the ever-increasing demand for smaller, faster, lower-power, and lower-cost microelectronic semiconductor devices, tools enabling faster and lower-cost research and development are required. Current development tools are only capable of achieving one data point per wafer. The goal of this effort is to determine the feasibility of developing a PVD chamber capable of achieving 100 or more data points on a single wafer. This will enable incremental variations in semiconductor process parameters across a wafer. If successful, this will result in orders of magnitude reduction in both time and cost for the microelectronic research and development efforts.