What is Rapid Thermal Processing

The semiconducting channel at the heart of each transistor is created, or activated, by quickly heating up the wafer to a set high temperature and cooling it down again, selectively turning the top few atomic layers from an insulator to a semiconductor.

This critical process is called rapid thermal processing, or RTP. In the video below, Applied Materials' Shankar Muthukrishnan discusses the role of RTP in manufacturing microchips and the progression of the technology from the simple furnaces of the 1970s all the way to the state of the art - the Applied Vantage Vulcan RTP system.