Veeco Instruments Inc. announced that a leading edge semiconductor company has placed an order for multiple laser annealing systems to accelerate the design and manufacturing of 2-nanometer gate-all-around logic semiconductor chips. The order includes LSA201 Laser Spike Annealing Systems in addition to an NSA500 Nanosecond Annealing System. Gate-all-around is a vertical stacking of planar channels resulting in improved device drive current capability with minimal leakage, less power consumption, and overall enhanced performance.

Laser spike annealing is a millisecond annealing technology used in front-end semiconductor manufacturing to lower the resistance of key transistor structures by activating dopants. Veeco?s LSA system is capable of high temperature annealing while staying within reduced thermal budgets of advanced devices at leading-edge nodes. The NSA500 system extends annealing capabilities to low thermal budget applications, like Backside Power Delivery and Contact Annealing for advanced nodes and material modification applications such as void-removal, recrystallization, and grain growth.

These annealing steps are instrumental in determining the electrical properties and performance of the resulting devices.