Entegris
Canvas Category OEM : Semiconductor
As a global company working with leading manufacturers to enable ongoing advancement in technology, we have a global infrastructure that includes strategically placed manufacturing sites, R&D facilities, and customer support centers. We make infrastructure investments that put us closer to our customers in all global regions. Our highly skilled team members, facilities and resources are right where you need them in order to help you solve your most advanced technology challenges.
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Chemicals and materials to play key role in chips as 2-nm milestone nears
James O’Neill, chief technology officer of American chip material maker Entegris, said it is no longer the chipmaking machines, but advanced materials and cleaning solutions that are taking center stage in making advanced production processes possible. “Thirty years ago, it was all about lithography [equipment] to make [transistors on chips] smaller and improve device performance,” O’Neill said. Lithography refers to the key chipmaking process in which integrated circuits are printed onto a chip. How finely a machine can print these circuits generally defines how advanced the chips are.
Kai Beckmann, CEO of Merck’s electronics business, echoed that sentiment. “We are moving from the past two decades where [chipmaking] tools are most important to advance technologies to the next decade, what our customers call the age of materials,” Beckmann said. “The tools are still important, but now materials make all the difference.”
The jump to 2-nm production for logic chips, for example, required a completely new chip architecture. In this new configuration, referred to as gate-all-around (GAA), transistors are stacked in a more complex, three-dimensional way than in earlier, planar configurations. Developing the materials for new transistor configurations like gate-all-around requires innovative materials “that will coat the top, the bottom and the sides equally,” O’Neill said, adding that the industry is engineering ways to do this “at atomic scale dimensions.”
Merck’s Beckmann gave another example of the industry’s material evolution: Copper is widely used as a conductive layer in current chipmaking processes, but to make ever smaller and more advanced chips, the industry is exploring new materials such as molybdenum.
🧪 TeraPore Technologies Raises $10M to Bring Precision Nanofiltration Solutions to New Markets
TeraPore Technologies, the developer of advanced nanofiltration membrane systems for biomanufacturing, today announced it has raised $10M in new financing. The round was led by existing investor Anzu Partners with participation from Entegris (NASDAQ: ENTG), a global leader in advanced materials science, and fellow existing investor, RA Capital Management. TeraPore will leverage the funding to launch its IsoBlock™ virus filter and expand the use of its core technology into new high value markets.