Future of chip making to lean heavily on AI for spotting defects, says Applied Materials

To make the top-of-the-line chips for Apple's iPhone, such as the A14, or Nvidia's A100 series AI processors, with billions of transistors, it takes a factory that costs $16 billion to build and maintain. That amount is up from $10 billion just eight years ago, and is set to rise significantly again, to perhaps $18 billion in the next few years. That has presented the chip industry with a quandary: Such chips more than ever need to be checked for defects, but chip makers are under more pressure than ever to get product out the door to recoup their investment. "You should naturally want to inspect more, because there are more process steps, more things that can go wrong, but if you look at what has happened, the economics have prohibited our customers from doing that inspection," said Keith Wells, who is group vice president of the imaging and process control group at Applied Materials, the biggest maker of tools for making chips. "We see this need to really solve this economic problem for our customers," said Wells, who spoke with ZDNet via Zoom.