Blog

Welcome back to the Lam Blog. We hope you had a happy and prosperous holiday season. As a prelude to what you can expect in upcoming blog stories, we wanted to highlight some of the favorite posts from 2017. We hope you find these an interesting and informative review as we begin the new year.

Industry Drivers
	Smart Cities – How the IoT Is Changing Urban Life in Asia From smart grids to smart buildings, the Internet of Things (IoT) has swept across Asia. Going well beyond consumer wearables, today’s city planners are leveraging IoT-enabled technologies to address some of the infrastructure and resource challenges of urbanization. The result is the rapid rise of “smart cities” across the region… Read More »
	Wearables Without Screens – Enhancing Quality of Life User experience designers around the world recognize that a screen isn’t always the most logical interface for every task or every person. Currently, much of our time is dominated by screens. However, as wearable technology advances and each device fits a specific purpose, we are starting to see new, screen-free wearables… Read More »

Tech Briefs
	A Look at Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) Imagine being able to deposit a film of material just a few atomic layers at a time. As impossible as that sounds, atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a reality. In fact, it’s being used in an ever-increasing number of applications as an extremely precise and controllable process for creating thin films… Read More »
	An Introduction to Interconnects We often hear that advanced chips contain billions of transistors – an incredible, mind-blowing fact to be sure – but did you know that large-scale integrated chips (that are the size of a fingernail) can contain ~30 miles of interconnect “wires” in stacked levels? These wires function like highways or pipelines to transport electrons… Read More »
	Primer on Packaging Ever open the body of your smartphone (perhaps unintentionally) and see small, black rectangles stuck on a circuit board? Those black rectangles are packaged chips. The external chip structure protects the fragile integrated circuits inside, as well as dissipates heat, keeps chips isolated from each other, and, importantly, provides connection to the circuit board… Read More »

Lam Technology News
	New Corvus Technology Takes Uniformity Control to the Edge Chipmakers want every part of the wafer to produce, or yield, good die. Advances in process technologies over the years have just about made this a reality, even as feature dimensions continue to shrink and devices grow ever more complex. Now, the last frontier is improving yields at the edge of the wafer – the outer 10 mm or so… Read More »
	Rising Need for Vertical Scaling in a Data-Driven World “Data is giving rise to a new economy” – The Economist (2017). This compelling reality makes the continued development of high-capacity data storage technologies like 3D NAND ever more important. With this in mind, Lam executives shared their perspectives on the growing need for vertical scaling in a “Vertical Reality” fireside chat… Read More »