As dimensional scaling is slowing down, the industry is entering the materials age, says Vamsi Paruchuri, ASM’s Corporate VP of Technology, Innovation and Market Research. As simple as it may seem, the gate oxide in modern chips is a marvel of engineering that took years, if not decades, to perfect. The nanofilm is an example of what chipmakers call a functional material. Chips traditionally also contain passive or structural materials, whose function is limited to insulation or structural support. But, according to Vamsi Paruchuri, that distinction is rapidly disappearing. “As devices shrink, every material in the device is becoming functional,” says the Corporate VP of Technology, Innovation and Market Research at ASM. The implications for Paruchuri’s firm are profound. Every additional functional material creates another critical deposition step, another interface that must be engineered and another process window that has to be controlled with atomic precision. Rather than being confined to a handful of high-value layers such as the gate stack, technologies like atomic layer deposition (ALD) and epitaxy are steadily moving deeper into the chip, into memory and increasingly into advanced packaging as well. Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. It’s a quiet revolution that’s shifting the industry’s center of gravity. For decades, performance gains came primarily from shrinking transistor dimensions through ever more advanced lithography. As that approach delivers diminishing returns, the challenge increasingly becomes engineering the dozens of materials that make up a modern chip and depositing them with atomic precision. “Materials will play a huge role in scaling going forward,” Paruchuri confirms. Anomaly ASM has spent decades developing the capabilities that will enable it to flourish in this ‘materials era’ of semiconductor manufacturing. The Almere-headquartered company famously played a key role in introducing the high-k gate dielectric stack that enabled continued CMOS scaling after silicon dioxide reached its physical limits. It later developed low-temperature plasma-enhanced ALD oxide processes that helped DRAM manufacturers continue scaling through double patterning when lithography alone was no longer sufficient. Silicon-germanium epitaxy subsequently extended the life of FinFET transistors well beyond their original roadmap. “We’re a materials discovery company. Early in the 1980s, semiconductor manufacturing involved about twenty elements in the periodic table. In the 2000s, it doubled to about forty. Today, ASM has reference ALD processes for 70 percent of elements in the periodic table.” As a prime example of how structural materials are turning functional, ASM recently announced a new process called flowable carbon. It’s a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) process in which a carbon film is deposited in a temporarily flowable state. Instead of simply coating the surface, the material flows into extremely narrow trenches and holes, filling them without leaving voids before solidifying. Because it also planarizes the surface as it fills, it simplifies subsequent manufacturing steps. “PECVD used to be a process for structural materials nobody gave a second thought, but with flowable carbon, it’s evolving into a carefully engineered functional process.” Another material change happening right now is molybdenum replacing tungsten in low-resistance interconnects. “This is a prime example of how new materials can simultaneously improve performance and simplify manufacturing,” says Paruchuri. Not only does molybdenum offer reduced resistance, but it also eliminates the need for barrier layers that were needed because of the fluorine-containing precursors used to deposit tungsten. Fewer layers are always a boon; the reduced numbe