Atomera

Atomera is a semiconductor materials company founded in 2001 and headquartered in Los Gatos, California. It was known as Mears Technologies until January 2016. Atomera trades upon NASDAQ with the symbol “ATOM”. Atomera invented Mears Silicon Technology (MST),^[1] a film applied to silicon wafers which improves silicon performance and efficiency. The technology is in the process toward commercial adoption.^[2] Atomera completed its IPO on August 5, 2016, raising $27.6 million.^[3]

MST

MST is a channel enhancement technology. The first objective is to improve mobility for both P and N type semiconductors. The second goal is to reduce gate leakage by limiting unwanted vertical current flow. Improving channel doping, MST reduces Vt variability, improved transistor matching and improved reliability. MST can be implemented on most existing semiconductor processes using available silicon manufacturing tools.^[4]

Moore Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, to accomplish this, manufacturers like Intel or AMD had relied on shrinking the manufacturing processes of their chips, which has reduced to 14nm or less,^[5] which plans to continue it in the future. The problem is that there is no much room left for shrinking, so technologies like MST focus on trying to improve silicon efficiency instead of shrinking the size of the transistors. With semiconductor manufacturing processes reaching 10nm, companies like Intel face more challenges that will prevent from shrinking more this semiconductors. MST aims to improve performance in other ways.^[6]

External Links

Atomera Website

References