Kate Dei Cas, Merck’s executive vice president and head of delivery systems and services and specialty gases, poses for photo during an interview with The Korea Times at the company's booth for SEMICON Korea 2026 at Coex in southern Seoul, Feb. 11. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) services is making the manufacturing process for memory chips increasingly complex and challenging.
As the conventional race to shrink transistors and pack more components densely in silicon circuits reaches its limits, chipmakers are scrambling to come up with new ways to enhance computing speed. In the process, architectures that place memory closer to graphics processing units or stack memory directly on top of them are gaining traction.
Known as advanced packaging, this is driving the importance of innovation in materials, according to Kate Dei Cas, Merck’s executive vice president and head of delivery systems and services and specialty gases.
“Materials innovation is going to become increasingly important as the industry is changing from having stacked high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and really getting to what we call 3D densification or advanced packaging,” Dei Cas told The Korea Times during an interview on the sidelines of SEMICON Korea 2026 in Seoul on Feb. 11.
“Advanced packaging becomes really critical when you start to stack. The success of 3D densification is really in those interfaces and the interconnects, and there are key materials that fall into that space.”
During SEMICON Korea 2026, Merck showcased a number of its new solutions for fabricating and packaging advanced chips for AI applications. One of them is molybdenum, a critical novel material for realizing smaller nodes and complex chip architectures.
Designed to replace tungsten and copper used in chip interconnect layers, it offers improved electrical conductivity when applied to low-resistance films for dynamic random-access memory, NAND flash and other advanced logic chips.
“So currently WF6 (tungsten hexafluoride) is used in interconnect layers, but when you look at molybdenum, they create an opportunity for improvement in how quickly you can get from one layer to the next,” she said. WF6 is a highly toxic and corrosive gas used for chemical vapor deposition to create tungsten films for interconnects.
However, using molybdenum comes with a few challenges because it is solid at ambient conditions and has to be heated to 175 degrees Celsius, meaning it has to be delivered under extreme high heat to be used in semiconductor manufacturing tools.
Source: Korea Times News
