Speaker: Chris Olsen
Affiliation: Oxidation Products, Applied Materials, Inc.

IC Industry: Simultaneous Problem Solving, Statistics & DOE in Materials Science

In the integrated circuit (IC) industry, continuous learning is a requirement given the IC industry constantly re-invents its technologies. In industry product development, my research area of ultra-uniform 3D-NAND oxidation has benefited from accelerated learning strategies. Multiple hypothesis problem solving techniques help to manage time risk and provide more thorough and systematic analysis to capture all potential scientific mechanisms. Risks are common for new product development, and systematic decomposition pre-mortem are tools for assessing unforeseen risks.

Industry product development is the regime of complexity, which is best addressed with efficient experimentation using design of experiments (DOE) and require application of multi-variables regression to quantify cross-term interactions. Combining multiple hypothesis driven problem solving with statistics & DOE has the greatest synergy to accelerate problem solving resolution.

About the Speaker

Chris Olsen is the Senior Director of Oxidation in the Front End Products (FEP) Group of Applied Materials, and has been with the company for close to 18 years. He focuses on process chemistry and hardware development in ultra-conformal atomic O radical oxidation of SiO2 in high aspect ratio (HAR) 3DNAND. Dr. Olsen holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering from UC Berkeley and a B.S. in Materials Engineering from UCLA. Dr. Olsen holds over 30 U.S. patents and is an author of over 40 publications.