TECHCET—the electronic materials advisory firm providing business and technology information— reports that the Total ALD/CVD precursor market grew 21% in 2021, reaching US$1.39 billion and is forecasted to grow 12% in 2022. The 2022 Precursor market will top US$1.56 billion due to strong industry growth overall, driven by higher production volumes of < 7nm logic devices and higher increased stacking and layers in 3DNAND devices. The transition to EUV lithography for DRAM fabrication will also result in opportunities for increased precursor revenues. More details on these market trends will be revelaed in TECHCET’s presentation given at the 2022 ALD Conference, starting this week in Ghent, Belgium, by Jonas Sundqvist, Ph.D., or can be found in TECHCET’s newly released Critical Materials Reports on ALD/CVD Metal Precursors and Dielectric Precursors.
“ALD and CVD are a materials and chemistry rich industry segment with major development efforts in place, with strong prospects for growth, and for the need of new materials”, states Jonas Sundqvist, Sr. Technology Analyst at TECHCET. “New manufacturing solutions designed to meet both cost and performance will rely on ALD precursor materials.”
New materials and related process technologies are being driven by changes in device design. For advanced logic, new precursors are required for transistors to form high-κ gate dielectrics, metal gate electrodes, strain/stress epi of the channel and channel materials. DRAM memory cells continue pushing for higher-κ capacitors. And advanced devices, especially logic, demand improved interconnect wiring, barriers, seed layers, selective via capping and encapsulation, insulators, as well as new and/or more dielectrics to support EUV and advanced ArFi photolithography.
Emerging challenges persist as a result of continued dimensional scaling addressed with materials, especially new materials deposited by ALD. Area selective deposition has been a trend in the past 5 years with a growing R&D community to implement this approach in future devices.
