Applied Materials’ New Vistara Wafer Manufacturing Platform Helps Customers Tackle Chipmaking Challenges - Seite 2

Intelligence

The Vistara platform’s intelligence helps customers address growing cadence and cost challenges by accelerating time to market and maximizing productivity and yield in high-volume manufacturing. Vistara platforms are configured with thousands of sensors that feed massive, real-time data to Applied’s AI^x software platform which offers applications spanning R&D, process transfer and ramp, and high-volume manufacturing. Actionable data from thousands of process variables enables engineers to use the power of machine learning and AI to accelerate recipes that can result in the best chip performance and power and widest process windows. Intelligence is incorporated throughout the platform including in the factory interface module where load locks are intelligently controlled to optimize pump and vent times, helping chipmakers reduce particles and defects to maximize yields. Platform robots are automatically calibrated to reduce start-up times by as much as 75 percent. In production, the Vistara platform continuously monitors and calibrates its components to minimize manual intervention, maximize uptime and predict maintenance needs.

Sustainability

The increase in semiconductor process complexity and steps adds to the energy and materials needed to produce each wafer. Vistara is the first platform purpose-built to advance Applied’s “3x30” initiative designed to achieve 30-percent reductions in equivalent energy use, the impact of chemical use, and cleanroom floorspace requirements, all by 2030. Engineers completely redesigned the Vistara platform’s gas panels to reduce the equivalent energy consumption by more than 50 percent compared to the previous design and optimized the way the platform uses energy-intensive sub-fab components including pumps, heat exchangers and chillers. These improvements can lower platform energy consumption by as much as 35 percent compared to previous platforms, helping chipmakers reduce their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Vistara also reduces the cleanroom footprint of a system by as much as 30 percent. Such savings help customers generate more wafers in smaller facilities, reducing the use of carbon-intensive construction materials such as concrete and steel, a 30-percent reduction of which can potentially save 1 million metric tons of carbon for every 100K wafer-starts-per-month (WSPM) fab built.