The Industrial Science Report: Manufacturing technologies and skills powering semiconductor fabs

U.S. semiconductor manufacturing is simultaneously reshoring and innovating and re-engineering materials and processes to reflect a push toward more precise, efficient, and maintainable manufacturing systems. That’s a little bit like changing a tire on a car, while it’s still moving, with new technicians, or worse, under skilled technicians, or maybe no technicians at all. Thankfully, some U.S. companies, universities, and government agencies are focused on the challenges for U.S. semiconductor fabs, as demand skyrockets to meet the needs of artificial intelligence.

This edition of The Industrial Science Report begins with the often-overlooked materials that quietly determine yield, uptime, and profitability in today’s fabs, then moves into emerging process technologies that could radically compress timelines and simplify chip production. From advanced thermal management to laser-tuned materials and 3D-printed chips, innovations in nanofabrication are reducing process sprawl and simplifying production. The final pieces step back to address the human constraint: reshoring only succeeds if the workforce can operate, maintain, and improve these increasingly sophisticated fabs.

3M delivers advanced materials to boost semiconductor fab efficiency

For smaller, faster chips, it’s not just about the silicon. Other materials are also critical to the fabrication process, such as chemical mechanical planarization materials, which remove excess material on the wafer’s front surface. 3M manufacturers these materials, as well as wafer supports, and thermal management solutions that directly affect yield, throughput, and process stability in chip production. For fabs, longer pad life and better thermal control mean fewer disruptions, less scrap, and more predictable operations. For maintenance and reliability engineers, these materials reduce wear, variability, and unplanned downtime in some of the most sensitive steps of semiconductor production.

According to Yi He, global laboratory director for semiconductors at 3M, these longer-lasting materials can support extended maintenance intervals. These materials can reduce routine service disruptions without requiring new monitoring approaches, since they operate within standard fab equipment and rely on established metrology methods. For maintenance teams, the primary change when transitioning from legacy consumables to new is recalibrating maintenance schedules to align with the longer expected lifetimes of these newer material systems.

“The semiconductor industry is moving toward larger AI devices, advanced 3D integration, and the convergence of silicon photonics with electronics, creating a need for ultra precise, flat, clean, and bondable wafer surfaces supported by materials that enable precision bonding, stable wafer handling, and co-packaged optical and electronic integration,” He says.

3M’s portfolio of materials engineered to improve semiconductor fabrication processes include chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) materials, pad conditioners, wafer support systems, and heat-resistant tapes. 3M’s longstanding partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers have helped it address emerging manufacturing challenges, such as AI-driven demand, 3D chiplet integration, and advanced packaging trends. These innovations support cleaner and flatter wafer surfaces, which are critical for stacking and linking the smaller chiplets that require even more precise connections. 3M positions thermal management and wafer handling innovations as enablers for integrating technologies such as silicon photonics and co-packaged optics. By extending pad life and stabilizing thermal performance, 3M’s materials help fab operators reduce cycle time and waste, contributing to more efficient production of high-performance chips.

University of Texas leads 3D printing innovation in chip fabrication

Semiconductor chip production has a reputation for being slow, complex, and unforgiving, so University of Texas researchers are developing a 3D printing platform to challenge all three bottlenecks. By collapsing months of lithography, alignment, and assembly steps into a single 3D printing process, this platform could dramatically reduce the number of tools, processes, and failure points on the fab floor. For maintenance and reliability teams, fewer process steps and fewer specialized tools mean simpler maintenance strategies, clearer root-cause analysis, and potentially higher overall equipment effectiveness. 

A multidisciplinary team led by The University of Texas at Austin unveiled holographic metasurface nano-lithography (HMNL), a 3D printing platform for semiconductor chips, promising higher design freedom and efficiency in production. It does this by using metasurfaces, ultra-thin optical masks capable of encoding high-density information, and holography, to create a 3D pattern. This significantly reduces production time from months to days, and HMNL enables simultaneous patterning of complex multimaterial structures at resolutions finer than a human hair. The research team—comprising academic and industry partners including Applied Materials, Northrop Grumman, NXP Semiconductors, University of Utah, Bright Silicon Technologies, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—has secured a $14.5 million DARPA grant to refine this technology for advanced electronics manufacturing. The platform supports complex designs (e.g., 3D printed capacitors and nonplanar structures) unattainable via conventional lithography. By eliminating multiple manufacturing steps and reducing material waste, HMNL directly addresses manufacturing complexity, cost, and sustainability concerns for future chip production.