Applied Materials

Applied Materials Italia (AMat) is a private company located in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and is a subsidiary of Applied Materials, a global company with a broad set of capabilities in material engineering that provides manufacturing equipment, services and software to the global semiconductor, display, solar photovoltaic and related industries. AMat has a long experience in the fields of semiconductor device physics, modeling and reliability. The company focuses on research and development in the field of electronics and micro/nano-electronics, aimed to the development of simulation models for charge and atoms transport and for the degradation of dielectric materials used in the micro/nano-electronics industry.

A flagship product is GinestraTM, a unique commercial device simulation software tool dedicated to the interpretation of electrical characterization measurements (I-V, C-V, G-V, charge pumping, gate/drain noise, bias temperature Instabilities, electrical stresses) and to the reliability assessment of semiconductor devices with a focus on dielectric materials and interfaces. GinestraTM software allows describing at the microscopic level the operations of RRAM devices starting from the creation of a conductive (Hf-rich) filament occurring during the forming processes. The model describes the charge transport, including tunneling and defect-assisted mechanisms. The power dissipation and temperature increase associated with the current are included, and the temperature-field induced generation, recombination and drift/diffusion of atomic species (Oxygen or metal ions, O vacancies, etc.) are described statistically through a kinetic Monte Carlo approach.

AMat's expertise in simulations of emerging electron devices is ideal to connect ab-initio material modeling including a rigorous theoretical treatment of quantum effects to the electrical performances of qubits devices relying on coupled quantum dots. AMat is pioneering a novel multiscale simulation approach connecting material properties including defects (crucial in nm devices as those targeted in the proposal) to electrical device behavior, which already includes quantum effects such as tunneling and charge quantization, and accounts for electron-phonon coupling.