Where atoms are engineered into impact
Forging new frontiers in semiconductor materials, the AMAT–NUS Advanced Materials Corporate Lab enters a new phase featuring advanced facilities, deeper industry integration and a strong focus on talent development.
t’s easy to overlook the tiny architectures that make modern life tick. The chips inside your smartphone. The motherboards that your car relies on. The servers crunching data behind every search and swipe.
Issue 05 | May 2025
Our modern society depends on the rapid and affordable scaling of computing performance in nearly every aspect of daily life, from consumer electronics to communications to national security. But traditional materials and manufacturing methods are nearing their limits. With the increasing demands of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet-ofThings, a paradigm shift is needed. That shift will be driven by the development of novel materials and innovative processing strategies — efforts that require close collaboration between industry and academia. This is particularly crucial for Singapore, where electronics constitute more than 9% of the national GDP and serve as a critical pillar of the economy.
Bridging that gap is the Applied Materials–NUS Advanced Materials Corporate Lab, hosted at the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) and the Faculty of Science at NUS. Since its establishment in 2018, the Lab, a collaboration between NUS and Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT), has grown into a global leader in semiconductor innovation. It aligns with Singapore’s broader national goals under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 (RIE2025) plan and Applied Materials’ “Singapore 2030” plan to strengthen its manufacturing capacity, R&D capabilities, technology ecosystem partnerships and workforce development in the city-state.
The Lab is underpinned by a unique, hybrid model that blends academia’s curiosity-driven inquiry with the customer-focused rigour of industry R&D. This is driven by a “try-fast-fail-fast” approach that enables rapid feedback and iteration between researchers and engineers. Over the past six years, this ecosystem has delivered more than 70 patent filings and technology disclosures and the successful transition of multiple low-TRL projects to industry-relevant technologies.
In the first phase, the Lab focused on application-inspired, fundamental materials research — designing and demonstrating new processes, and building a scientific understanding from first principles. “We have achieved promising results in Phase 1. In particular, we have transferred four high-value projects to the scaleup phase in Applied Materials,” says Professor Silvija Gradecak-Garaj from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CDE, and Co-Director of the Lab.
Issue 05 | May 2025
Working as a multi-disciplinary team, the Applied MaterialsNUS Advanced Materials Corporate Lab researchers combine theoretical and experimental approaches, as well as engineering and scientific expertise, to develop new materials critical for the semiconductor industry.
At the heart of these achievements are the Lab’s innovations in materials engineering for next-generation semiconductor technologies. “One high-value project addressed the future challenges of stacking memory devices, in which engineers from AMAT and NUS have developed novel processes that tackle key technology inflection points in memory density scaling,” says Dr John Sudijono, Director of Engineering at AMAT and Co-Director of the Lab. The project developed nanostructured diamond films — an enabling technology for advanced semiconductor architectures such as 3D NAND and DRAM.
The Lab has also broken new ground in two-dimensional materials, pioneering a method for wafer-scale growth at back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible temperatures, with applications in microelectronic interconnects and logic components, and has already attracted interest from major industry players.
These outcomes, says Prof Gradecak-Garaj, are a result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between AMAT and NUS. “We combine theoretical and experimental approaches, as well as engineering and scientific expertise, to tackle high-value problems of the semiconductor industry.”
Expanding the possibilities
Officially launched by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat in October 2024, Phase 2 of the Lab includes a larger, more advanced cleanroom with state-ofthe-art semiconductor process equipment and enhanced R&D capabilities for material synthesis and characterisation.
This next phase continues to focus on developing industry-scale solutions to real-world manufacturing challenges, with an emphasis on integrating multiple processing steps, developed in Phase 1, into a single, optimised flow. “This will not only lower production time and costs, but also enable new materials and processes required for the next-generation electronics that are integral to fields spanning healthcare, automotive, telecommunications and artificial intelligence,” adds Prof Gradecak-Garaj.
Issue 05 | May 2025 Forging New Frontiers
Many of these applications are being tailored to work with Applied Material’s Endura platform, the industry’s most widely adopted cluster tool for depositing thin metal films. The focus on new materials understanding, as well as materials engineering developed in this second phase, will provide enhanced value-add to Applied Materials to meet the performance and power requirements of advanced semiconductors.
Growing talent for the long game
“The Lab is also a training ground for talent. Since its inception, it has supported more than 70 PhD students, researchers and interns, many of whom have gone on to contribute across Singapore’s semiconductor industry,” says Professor Richard Wong from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, NUS, who is also a Co-Director of the Lab. Phase 2 will deepen that commitment, with new courses, internships and co-developed educational programmes at NUS focused on microelectronics, advanced materials and process engineering.
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to right: Mr Brian Tan, Regional President (Southeast Asia), Applied Materials; Dr Satheesh Kuppurao, Group Vice President, Applied Materials; Mr Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman, National Research Foundation; Mr Hsieh Fu Hua, Chairman, NUS Board of Trustees; and Professor Tan Eng Chye, President, NUS.
(Bottom) Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat was given a tour of exhibits that showcased cutting-edge solutions and breakthroughs in material science, microelectronics and other areas.
“The centrepiece of this success is the Lab’s collaborative model — one that brings together academia and industry to generate novel ideas and to move them into practice,” adds Prof Gradecak-Garaj. “We look forward to the continued success of Phase 2 as we work towards translating more advanced materials research into impactful solutions.”