Scott Bibaud has served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a director since October 2015. Mr. Bibaud has been active in the semiconductor industry for over 25 years. He has successfully built a number of businesses in his career which grew to generate over $1 Billion in revenue at some of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. Most recently he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Altera’s Communications and Broadcast Division. Prior to that he was Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Mobile Platforms Group at Broadcom.
Tell us about your company.
Atomera Incorporated is a semiconductor materials and technology licensing company focused on deploying its proprietary, silicon-proven technology into the semiconductor industry. Our mission is to extend the life and performance of today’s semiconductor technologies through innovation at the materials level. Our Mears Silicon Technology™ (MST ®), a proprietary material/film technology, enhances transistor performance, power efficiency, and scalability, helping chipmakers achieve next-gen results utilizing their existing manufacturing infrastructure.
As AI accelerates demand for more powerful and efficient systems, advancements in materials are becoming the catalyst that makes those gains possible, enabling continued breakthroughs in power, performance, area, and cost (PPAC). Atomera is currently working with several of the world’s top semiconductor producers and playing a hands-on role in areas like advanced logic (GAA), DRAM, power, and wireless/radio frequency (RF), underscoring the industry’s growing recognition of MST’s potential benefits.
What problems are you solving?
Atomera is trying to solve key bottlenecks in the industry, including performance and power to yield and cost through MST.
For decades, Moore’s Law, which accurately predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double around every two years, kept the industry moving forward. The steady pace of innovation is now being tested. As chips shrink to 3nm and beyond, FinFets can no longer deliver the needed performance and efficiency, so manufacturers are switching to gate-all-around (GAA) technology. However, GAA isn’t perfect. While GAA addresses electrostatic challenges, it also introduces new ones. This is where Atomera’s advanced materials come into play.
This reality is driving a growing consensus across the industry that scaling alone is not enough. In fact, a recent survey saw that 94% of respondents believe simply shrinking nodes will no longer be sufficient. Instead, 99% of those polled are pointing to innovation in new materials and technologies as essential to unlocking PPAC improvements to support AI workloads.
It turns out that materials, such as MST, can continue to improve transistor channel behavior by improving electron mobility, lowering leakage, or improving variability, enabling better performance or lower power, even as the industry carries on to the next node. These breakthroughs in advanced materials are empowering the industry to achieve higher performance with reduced space and energy requirements.
What application areas are your strongest?
One of MST’s most strategic advantages is its ability to be integrated with minimal equipment changes, allowing manufacturers to extract new levels of performance and efficiency from existing manufacturing processes, achieving more without the need for costly new tools.
In power electronics, MST helps push past today’s material and architectural limits by enabling devices to handle higher voltages and currents more efficiently through reduced on-resistance and improved breakdown voltage. This means MST can offer customers a path to better PPAC without major design changes or expensive process overhauls.
RF products are facing increasing signal performance issues with the transition to 5G. Low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) and advanced RF switching technologies are the unsung heroes ensuring signal strength, clarity, and battery life. Innovations like MST can improve signal performance and extend RF-SOI’s platforms, delivering higher gain, lower noise, and faster switching. For a mobile phone user, this translates to clearer signals, higher bandwidth, and longer battery life.
MST also has applications for memory integration. By reducing variability and leakage in memory transistors, MST enhances stability and density in DRAM and SRAM devices. And in the GAA arena, Atomera’s technology can be used to optimize performance in at least four different areas of the transistor.
Meanwhile, in GaN-on-silicon structures, MST enables improved yield for high-performance RF and power devices.
What keeps your customers up at night?
The gap between the needs of AI workloads and the capabilities of today’s silicon-based infrastructure is one of the largest industry challenges right now. In the same survey, more than 200 semiconductor engineers, materials scientists, and technical industry leaders in the United States found that 76% of decision-makers believe data centers will fall short of meeting soaring AI and high-performance computing demands. To keep shrinking and improving chips for massive AI systems, engineers are turning to advanced materials as the lever for PPAC gains and to keep progress on track.
To meet the performance and efficiency demands of the AI market, designers are turning to the most advanced semiconductor processes using GAA transistors. Today, the first wafers with this architecture are entering production, but the power, performance, and yield still have significant room for improvement. Our customers are looking for any compelling solution to help achieve those goals, and Atomera’s technology is one key piece of the puzzle.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
It is widely understood in the industry that it takes a new material roughly 18 years from first concept to volume production in the semiconductor supply chain. Atomera’s material technology has successfully navigated this journey. This level of investment and persistence in an independent company is rare, and while there are other providers of advanced materials, we feel that most are complementary, or additive, to our technology, rather than competitors. Many of our largest customers have R&D teams internally who are trying to solve the same problems that we are addressing, and Atomera’s technology provides a very well-developed tool they can leverage, making MST uniquely positioned in the market. It takes a full ecosystem of solution providers to bring the most advanced nodes to market, and Atomera is happy to play our part.
What new features/technology are you working on?
Atomera is continually working to understand the challenges faced by companies across industries we serve and refining our film and integration techniques to deliver compelling solutions to customers. For example, companies making RF front ends for cellular applications are confronted with increasing demands as phones use more bandwidth and communicate over more and more frequency bands. RF components are significant consumers of battery power in mobile phones, but these new frequency bands require radios to scan an even wider area than before, placing pressure to lower the power of their LNAs. Recently, we determined that MST can be very effective in helping them meet this goal while simultaneously improving their RF switch efficiency. We are working on solutions like these in several different markets for a variety of customers.
Another area of growing focus is compound semiconductors. Our work in GaN shows how MST can be leveraged to bring physical improvements to a material that translate well into electrical advantages. We have exploratory projects underway in other compound semiconductors, which we expect will start maturing in the near term as well.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Today, Atomera and MST are widely recognized across the semiconductor industry, and we collaborate with a broad range of leading companies. Oftentimes, after Atomera validates how MST can be used to help a customer with a known problem or to achieve device improvements, we will meet with the team to show the supporting data. Next, our teams will conduct Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) simulations to understand how MST can be used in their fabs and then wafer demos are run where MST is deposited on their wafers and other tests are conducted. If all goes well, we will license our technology to them, install it on one of their production tools, and go into a period of tuning our film and their integration method to maximize performance. Atomera’s TCAD modeling, epi deposition, and integration engineering teams provide support the whole way, helping our customers transition to mass production. At that stage, our business model is to take a small royalty on every wafer they manufacture while partnering with them to optimize the next process they’re working on.
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