Driving the news: For the third time since 2023, Lam Research has won a prestigious Edison Award for innovation in materials science. And this time, we’ve got two winners: ALTUS® Halo, which won a Gold award, and Akara®, which earned a Silver award.
Why it matters: The Edison Awards is a prestigious competition held every year celebrating global innovation across industries, breakthrough products and services, and visionary thinkers. Winners were selected via a rigorous, peer evaluation process that prioritized bold ideas brought to life with real-world impact and market adoption.
- Lam also won in 2023 for Argos®, Prevos® and Selis® selective etch technologies, and in 2025 for Lam Cryo™ 3.0 cryogenic etch technology.
ALTUS Halo and Akara won their respective awards in the Microelectronics Material Advancements category, selected from hundreds of nominations.
The Edison Awards underscore the tools’ significant impact and transformative potential in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.
- ALTUS Halo is the world’s first atomic layer deposition (ALD) system that enables atom-by-atom deposition of molybdenum (Mo) for advanced semiconductor metallization. By making Mo viable in high-volume manufacturing, it helps reduce interconnect resistance and scaling bottlenecks in increasingly complex 3D memory and logic devices.
- Akara is Lam Research’s breakthrough conductor etch technology, delivering advanced plasma control to shape ever-smaller, higher-aspect-ratio features required by 3D chip architectures. Its angstrom-level precision and fast plasma response help chipmakers improve pattern fidelity, yield, and device performance as scaling continues.
“The Edison Awards honor innovations that move industries forward, and ALTUS Halo and Akara do exactly that,” says Andy Cohen, CVP, Global Products Group, Lam Research. “Together, these technologies provide differentiated, proven, scalable innovation that solves some of the industry’s hardest challenges associated with the complexity of 3D device architectures in memory and logic and in turn helps power what’s next in AI computing.”
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ALTUS® Halo and Akara® Edison Award pages
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And the Edison Award Goes to... Argos, Prevos, and Selis!