The technology behind the microelectronics that power our lives

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, thanks to its domination of the market for computer chips used in the data centers that run artificial intelligence applications and other digital tools.

But the US tech giant doesn’t actually manufacture those chips or develop the materials needed to fabricate them. That’s the job of companies like Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and Intel, plus countless other firms that supply these chipmakers with the exotic raw materials they need.

These companies’ chips do more than AI computations in data centers. They run our laptops, smartphones, and cars. Increasingly they are running formerly mundane appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators. And now, chips are moving into new applications such as robotics and optical sensors known as retinomorphic devices.

A new syndicated report published by CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society that specializes in scientific knowledge management, delves into the information that has accumulated around microelectronics. (ACS publishes C&EN.) As computer-chip architecture gets more sophisticated, companies are introducing new kinds of materials. For example, the CAS analysis finds fast growth for 2D inorganic materials such as graphene, sulfides, and selenides in devices including supercapacitors, semiconductors, and field-effect transistors.

Patents selected by CAS for C&EN provide a glimpse into the research that major companies are doing in the microelectronics sector. IBM is an active patentee of transistor technology. For example, one recent patent describes a method of forming connections in a stacked transistor made with nanosheet technology. Another IBM patent describes a method of controlling electricity flow from the top to the bottom of a stacked transistor.

IBM and a few other US firms aside, most top patent holders in the microelectronics field are based in Asia. At South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, scientists are actively patenting technology related to the photomasks used to project images of circuits onto silicon wafers. One patent describes a method of forming consecutive patterns on a photoresist film to create thinner circuit lines than would be possible with a traditional photolithography process. Another Samsung patent describes an adhesive layer that sticks an organic mask to a substrate so that a metal transistor gate can be more effectively etched.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of computer chips, holds several chemistry-focused patents. In one, TSMC describes a tin-based photoresist that can be used to pattern circuit lines with extreme-ultraviolet-light (EUV) lithography, the method used to fabricate the most-advanced computer chips.

TSMC uses EUV lithography to manufacture Nvidia’s premier AI chips, which contain circuit lines as thin as 3 nm. As the demand for AI and other advanced computing technologies grows, intellectual property creation in microelectronics will no doubt keep pace.