By Zhebo Chen

Imagine a race car trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. No matter how powerful the engine, that gridlock sets the pace. Inside today’s AI chips, the contact – the tiny metal bridge between each transistor and the wiring above – has become that traffic jam for electrons, dictating how fast signals can move.

Because every signal must pass through a contact first, this small structure has an outsized impact on performance and power efficiency. Choosing the right contact material – and perfecting how it’s deposited and integrated – has become essential to unlocking the next wave of gains as the industry advances beyond the 2nm era.

Yet with escalating AI demand, the need to pack more transistors per area puts new pressure on the contacts. As devices shrink, contacts must shrink correspondingly, making this tiny structure one of the first places where scaling hits fundamental physical limits. In these ultra-narrow spaces, electrons collide with the sidewalls far more often, and this increased scattering escalates resistance sharply.

Applied recognized tungsten’s physics-driven limits early and prepared for what comes next – positioning molybdenum (moly) to carry contact scaling forward. Less sensitive to sidewall scattering, moly maintains lower resistivity as geometries tighten. In advanced test structures, Applied’s selective moly delivers ~15% lower contact resistance than selective tungsten. Scaled across billions of contacts, that reduction translates into meaningful system‑level speed and efficiency gains. 

Solving issues of this complexity demands deep materials expertise – exactly where Applied shines. Enter the Spectral™ ALD system, one of the first in a new series of atomic layer deposition tools built on the proven Centris™ mainframe. Spectral™ ALD enables moly at scale, pairing specialized hardware with integrated process capability. Drawing on more than two decades of leadership in selective materials engineering, it delivers the atomic‑level control needed for bottom‑up, monocrystalline moly growth. Already shipped to multiple customers for advanced‑logic production, Spectral™ ALD provides fabs with a confident path to ramping moly contacts.

As AI workloads surge and nodes push deeper into the nanoscale, lowering contact resistance remains one of the most effective levers for improving speed and energy efficiency. By solving the materials and integration hurdles of selective moly, Applied is enabling the next generation of contact scaling – and accelerating the industry’s path into the angstrom era.