Nam Hyun-woo has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2013, mostly covering business and politics. He currently belongs to the Business Desk where he covers topics such as emerging tech, AI, ICT and Korea's chaebol community. Prior to joining the team, he was the paper's correspondent for the presidential office of Korea during the Yoon Suk Yeol and Moon Jae-in administrations.
Materials innovation key to keeping up with chip progress, says Merck executive VP
Katherine Dei Cas, Merck’s executive vice president and head of delivery systems and services and specialty gases, poses for a photo during an interview with The Korea Times at the company's booth at SEMICON Korea 2026 at Coex in southern Seoul, Feb. 11. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo
By Nam Hyun-woo
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) services is making the manufacturing process for memory chips increasingly complex and challenging.
As the conventional race to shrink transistors and pack more components densely in silicon circuits reaches its limits, chipmakers are scrambling to come up with new ways to enhance computing speed. In the process, architectures that place memory closer to graphics processing units or stack memory directly on top of them are gaining traction.
Known as advanced packaging, this is driving the importance of innovation in materials, according to Katherine Dei Cas, Merck’s executive vice president and head of delivery systems and services and specialty gases.
“Materials innovation is going to become increasingly important as the industry is changing from having stacked high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and really getting to what we call 3D densification or heterogeneous integration,” Dei Cas told The Korea Times during an interview on the sidelines of SEMICON Korea 2026 in Seoul on Feb. 11.
“Bringing different chips and their functionality closer together (advanced packaging) enables higher functional density, better performance and lower latency. Heterogeneous integration takes this a step further by breaking apart what would be a monolithic chip into smaller chips and then reconnecting those. These interconnects are decisive for device performance, and materials become critical in this space.”
During SEMICON Korea 2026, Merck showcased a number of its new solutions for fabricating and packaging advanced chips for AI applications. One of them is molybdenum, a critical novel material for realizing smaller nodes and complex chip architectures.
Designed to replace tungsten and copper used in chip interconnect layers, it offers improved electrical conductivity when applied to low-resistance films for dynamic random-access memory, NAND flash and other advanced logic chips.
“Currently, WF6 (tungsten hexafluoride) is used in interconnect layers, but when you look at molybdenum, with its superior properties allows getting faster from one layer to the next,” she said. WF6 is a highly toxic and corrosive gas used for chemical vapor deposition to create tungsten films for interconnects.
However, using molybdenum comes with a few challenges because it is solid at ambient conditions and has to be heated to 175 degrees Celsius, meaning it has to be delivered under extreme high heat to be used in semiconductor manufacturing tools.
“It is a very complex molecule to handle and to deliver, and that’s where it had driven the industry to come up with an integrated solution,” Dei Cas said, stressing Merck as an integrated solution provider. The element requires strict moisture control and stable heating during delivery, and Merck’s integrated handling system is designed to minimize material loss and reduce yield risks in advanced interconnect processes.
“The molybdenum compound manufacturing facility is being localized at our Eumseong site (in North Chungcheong Province), and our delivery systems products are being produced at our Ansan site (in Gyeonggi Province). This setup ensures a resilient and high-quality supply chain for this critical molecule,” she said. Merck plans to begin supplying Korean chipmakers within this year.
People visit Merck's booth at SEMICON Korea 2026 at Coex in southern Seoul, Feb. 11. Korea Times photo by Nam Hyun-woo
Along with molybdenum, Dei Cas offered a glimpse of the company’s new specialty gas under development to replace fluorinated gases, which she said have higher global warming potential (GWP) but are “very good at doing what they need to do” in etching or chamber cleaning.
Developing the new specialty gas is challenging because it has to be sustainable and low-GWP, but at the same time retain the characteristics and performance level of fluorinated gases.
“So we’re using AI to be able to do that materials innovation,” Dei Cas said. “We’re running different simulations with different molecular configurations to identify which compound will perform the best, and then we can focus our work on developing that particular in more depth.”
To address these challenges, she noted, Merck is working with its customers and original equipment manufacturers.
“The industry has recognized that, in order to innovate at the speed necessary, collaboration is of the utmost importance,” she said.
Dei Cas projected that the semiconductor industry will enter a phase of explosive growth over the next five years, with the demand driven by AI leading to what she described as “hockey-stick growth” in reaching $1 trillion in the industry’s total value by 2030.
She explained that the need for more materials, additional process steps and increasingly complex stacking structures will expand growth opportunities for materials companies.
“Because the understanding of chips is going to be more and more complex, you’re going to need more and more innovative materials that are used in the process to manufacture chips,” she said.
"Merck's diverse portfolio positions us uniquely to understand the semiconductor industry and our customers. For instance, consider the manufacturing of a chip like HBM in Korea. Merck's business spans various manufacturing operations from construction to manufacturing to metrology and inspection, allowing us to engage from multiple perspectives, ultimately connecting the dots."