As the largest U.S. supplier of semiconductor equipment, Applied Materials is at the forefront of microchip innovation. Now it’s bringing its energy to impactful research at Arizona State University. Through a series of grants, the company is teaming up with ASU faculty to tackle big challenges in the microelectronics world. These projects blend the company’s expertise with ASU’s engineering muscle to spark breakthroughs that could shape the future of chip manufacturing.

These projects blend the company’s expertise with ASU’s engineering muscle to spark breakthroughs that could shape the future oBaoxin Li is a professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. Through a series of multiyear grants, he and his team are collaborating with Applied Materials to create new artificial intelligence systems to make sense of complex microelectronics manufacturing data. The new technology builds on Li’s similar, successful projects in the medical sector.f chip manufacturing.

We’re developing smart systems that can learn from complex, often unlabeled data whether it’s detecting faults in semiconductor recipes, enhancing electron microscope images or fusing multiple data types into one powerful model, Li says. This work has the potential to make manufacturing faster, more reliable and more efficient. For one phase of the project, Li and the team are focusing on improving how to understand and control the manufacturing processes used in semiconductor production.

These processes involve instructions, called recipes, that include varied types of data such as images, sensor readings and machine configurations. Normally, these processes are analyzed separately, which misses how they relate to each other.

Source: https://news.asu.edu/20250616-science-and-technology-aipowered-smart-medicine-meets-smart-microchips