Growing large single-crystal material is extremely challenging: the faster a crystal grows, the more likely it is that a large single crystal will destabilize to form many smaller crystals with undesirable defects.
As a result, traditional technologies grow large silicon ingots quite slowly, with state-of-the-art growth speeds achieving roughly only 1 to 1.5mm of growth per minute.
At Applied Materials, Peter Kellerman discovered a new technique enabling stable single-crystal growth at hyper-fast rates surpassing 250 mm/minute or 16 million atomic layers of perfect single crystal every second.
This new way of rapidly growing crystal is called the Floating Silicon Method (FSM)™.
Early investigation of FSM™ material has shown that this hyper-fast growth technique further enables some of the lowest defect densities and oxygen content ever commercialized in single-crystal silicon.
High throughput and superior electronic quality translate directly to unprecedented cost reductions and performance improvements that cascade throughout the manufacturing process.
