The conference is organized by the American Vacuum Society (AVS), and this year the program chairs of the ALD conference, the larger of the two, are Professor Mikko Ritala and Professor emeritus Markku Leskelä from the Department of Chemistry. The conference is dedicated to the science and technology of atomic layer controlled deposition and etching of thin films.
Since 2001, the ALD conference has been held in the United States, Europe, and Asia on an alternating basis. It was organized in Helsinki (Porthania) in 2004 to celebrate 30 years of ALD and is now returning to celebrate 50 years since the groundbreaking work on ALD by Dr Tuomo Suntola and his coworkers, who in 1974 filed the first patent on the technology, which was then called Atomic Layer Epitaxy.
Dr Tuomo Suntola himself will present the opening remarks of the ALD 2024 conference. Suntola is a recipient of the 2018 Millennium Technology prize for ALD that is in use worldwide in manufacturing of integrated circuits. The plenary talk will be given by Dr Ivo J. Raaijmakers of ASM, The Netherlands, who has been an active player in building the long-term University of Helsinki-ASM collaboration.
Last year the ALD/ALE conference was organized in Bellevue, near Seattle in the United States, with about 740 participants. It is worth noting the high participation from industry in this conference series (55% in 2023). This is a direct consequence of the importance of ALD and ALE in future semiconductor devices. This year’s conference received a record high number of abstracts (502 total) and may well set a record in attendance, which is approaching one thousand participants.
The conference is truly international, with the greatest number of abstracts coming from the United States, South Korea, Germany, Finland, the Netherland and Japan.