Human-machine collaboration for improving semiconductor process development.

One of the bottlenecks to building semiconductor chips is the increasing cost required to develop chemical plasma processes that form the transistors and memory storage cells. These processes are still developed manually using highly trained engineers searching for a combination of tool parameters that produces an acceptable result on the silicon wafer. The challenge for computer algorithms is the availability of limited experimental data owing to the high cost of acquisition, making it difficult to form a predictive model with accuracy to the atomic scale.