In the race to develop faster, smaller and more energy-efficient chips, design teams often focus intensely on architecture, functionality and scaling strategies. However, an often-underappreciated factor — atomic-level defects and contamination — plays a critical role in determining whether a design will meet real-world performance, yield and cost targets.

As semiconductor nodes push into the angstrom era, the influence of microscopic impurities becomes magnified. For R&D and design engineers, understanding how these factors impact performance, power consumption yield, and ultimately, business outcomes, is essential for delivering manufacturable and commercially viable products.

The silent saboteurs: Atomic-level defects and contamination

Atomic-level defects — such as vacancies, interstitials and dislocations — along with contaminants like metal ions, organic residues and particles, may seem minute, but they can fundamentally degrade device performance. These imperfections can be introduced during wafer processing, material deposition, etching or packaging.

Here’s how they affect chips:

  • Performance degradation: Contaminants can trap charge carriers, cause leakage currents or alter threshold voltages. This leads to variability, instability and degraded switching behavior in transistors.
  • Increased power consumption: Impurities can increase gate leakage or subthreshold leakage, leading to higher standby power — a critical issue in mobile and edge devices where every microwatt counts.
  • Yield loss: Even minute contamination can result in functional failures, increasing the number of non-functional dies per wafer. In high-volume production, this has a profound impact on cost.
  • Long-term reliability: Some contaminants can trigger time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) or accelerate electromigration, reducing chip lifespan and increasing RMA (return merchandise authorization) risk.

Implications for R&D design teams

Design teams need to shift their mindset from simply meeting specifications on paper to ensuring designs are robust under real manufacturing conditions. Here’s how contamination and defects should influence design decisions:

1. Designing for manufacturability

  • Evaluate the susceptibility of your layout and materials to known sources of contamination.
  • Collaborate early with process engineers to understand process sensitivities and contamination controls.
  • Incorporate design-for-yield (DfY) practices, including redundancy and fault tolerance, especially in analog and memory-intensive blocks.

2. Power and thermal budgets

  • Recognize that leakage currents caused by defects can skew power budgets.
  • Simulate not just ideal, but worst-case power consumption scenarios — accounting for possible contamination-induced degradation.

3. Material choices

  • Material interactions at atomic levels (e.g., metal-dielectric interfaces) can attract impurities. Selecting materials with better chemical compatibility and lower affinity for contaminants can mitigate risks.

4. Process-aware modeling

  • Include defect and impurity parameters in SPICE models and simulations to better predict circuit behavior under non-ideal conditions.

The role of manufacturing in eliminating impurities

Manufacturing plays a vital role in controlling atomic-level defects through:

  • Ultra-clean process environments (e.g., cleanrooms with ISO Class 1–5 control)
  • High-purity source materials
  • Advanced contamination monitoring (e.g., T-VAC, TOF-SIMS, and particle metrology)
  • Dry, plasma-based and vacuum-based cleaning technologies that reduce chemical usage and prevent recontamination

In addition, novel solutions like the SisuSemi one can significantly reduce defects and contamination. It offers an innovative solution that utilizes low-temperature ultra-high-vacuum technology to tackle atomic-level defects and contamination. This can significantly reduce the impact of atomic-level impurities on device performance, power consumption and yield.

Moreover, SisuSemi’s solution can be easily integrated into existing manufacturing processes, making it a cost-effective and efficient way to improve device performance and yield. By leveraging SisuSemi’s technology, manufacturers can take a significant step towards achieving the goal of perfection in semiconductor manufacturing

Design teams must understand that clean processes enable clean chips, and factor these capabilities into their decisions.

Business impact: From clean atoms to clean metrics

Atomic-level defects and contamination may appear as microscopic issues, but their business impact is anything but small:

  • Lower yields → Higher cost per good die
  • Increased power draw → Missed power/performance targets
  • Early failures → Damaged brand and support costs
  • Design re-spins → Delays and lost market opportunities

In highly competitive markets like AI accelerators, mobile SoCs or automotive-grade ICs, these consequences can make the difference between market leadership and missed deadlines.

Final thoughts: Make clean a design requirement

For semiconductor R&D teams, atomic-level cleanliness and defect control shouldn’t just be a responsibility for the fab. Instead, it should be a design consideration from day one.

Ask yourself:

  • Will this design perform as expected under minor contamination?
  • Are we accounting for the variability caused by atomic-scale defects?
  • Have we consulted with manufacturing about contamination-sensitive design choices?

As devices scale down and application demands ramp up, integrating process knowledge, cleanliness awareness and manufacturability into the design loop will be critical to delivering high-performance, high-yielding chips that meet both technical and business goals.

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