Applied SmartFactory® Speaking Session
A New Design Mindset to Enable
AI-Driven Factory Automation
Automation Products Group | Applied Materials
October 13–15, 2026 | Moscone Center, San Francisco
Discussion
Factory automation is at an inflection point. The vision: a new generation of fully autonomous process tools, deeply integrated with the CIM system.
The success of autonomous tools depends on establishing a data and context relationship with broader fab operations. Making process tools autonomous in concert with the fab is not entirely new, but the design paradigm, and the performance gains AI makes possible, are well beyond today’s factory system capability.
The industry has largely operated at the lot level for Advanced Process Control. Autonomous tools require the ability to operate at the wafer level, and that demands an entirely new set of capabilities.
This session explores the design changes required to reach these new levels of factory performance — including the distributed architectures needed to scale factory-wide, and how machine learning and agentic solutions are enabling a new level of learning. These capabilities have proven themselves in point solutions and applications; factory-wide rollout remains the challenge.
What you'll take away
- Why wafer-level control — not lot-level — is the prerequisite for autonomous process tools
- The distributed design patterns required to scale automation across an entire fab
- Where machine learning and agentic solutions are already delivering, and why factory-wide rollout stalls
- Projections for capacity and yield gains as these new design concepts are adopted
For questions, contact:
Selim S. Nahas
[email protected]
