Multibillion-Dollar R&D Platform to Accelerate Semiconductor Innovation
Applied Materials has announced a landmark investment to build the world’s largest and most advanced facility for collaborative semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment research and development (R&D).
The new Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center is planned as the heart of a high-velocity innovation platform designed to accelerate development and commercialization of the foundational technologies needed by the global semiconductor and computing industries.
To be located at an Applied campus in Silicon Valley, the multibillion-dollar facility is designed to provide a breadth and scale of capabilities that is unique in the industry, including more than 180,000 square feet – more than three American football fields – of state-of-the-art cleanroom for collaborative innovation with chipmakers, universities and ecosystem partners. Designed from the ground up to accelerate the pace of introducing new manufacturing innovations, the new EPIC Center is expected to reduce the time it takes the industry to bring a technology from concept to commercialization by several years, while simultaneously increasing the commercial success rate of new innovations and the return on R&D investments for the entire semiconductor ecosystem.
“While semiconductors are more critical to the global economy than ever before, the technology challenges our industry faces are becoming more complex,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “This investment presents a golden opportunity to re-engineer the way the global industry collaborates to deliver the foundational semiconductor process and manufacturing technologies needed to sustain rapid improvements in energy-efficient, high-performance computing.”
Addressing Industry Challenges
Tremendous growth in the number of connected devices and the rise of artificial intelligence are driving increasing demand for chips and the opportunity for a $1 trillion semiconductor market. At the same time, chipmakers face significant challenges to sustain the pace of innovation required to meet this demand.
The “angstrom era” of chipmaking requires new foundational manufacturing technologies that are orders of magnitude more complex than those used today. This increased complexity drives higher R&D and manufacturing costs, while lengthening the time it takes to develop and commercialize new semiconductor technology through high-volume manufacturing. Further hurdles include a critical shortage of technical talent needed by the industry and the pressing need to reduce the carbon intensity of the electronics industry.
Accelerating Chipmaker Roadmaps
For decades, chipmakers have relied on rapid advances in foundational semiconductor technology to deliver continued improvements in chip performance, power, area, cost and time-to-market (PPACt). Billions of dollars are invested each year to drive new inflections in the way chipmakers create, shape, modify, analyze and connect materials and structures at the atomic scale. Once developed, these technologies must be proven to work reliably and cost-effectively in the industrial-scale equipment for high-volume manufacturing.
While these technology inflections continue to drive the industry forward, the sheer complexity of the engineering challenges requires a new approach to R&D. The traditional development model, starting with materials engineering equipment and process innovation, is a serial, compartmentalized process with no central hub for collaboration across the ecosystem. The industry needs a new model that breaks down traditional silos, builds denser networks of collaboration, and delivers tighter feedback loops that can increase the speed and lower the cost of innovation.
Applied’s new EPIC Center is designed to be a premier platform for leading logic and memory chipmakers to collaborate with the equipment ecosystem. For the first time, chipmakers can have their own dedicated space within an equipment supplier facility, extending their in-house pilot lines and providing early access to next-generation technologies and tools – months or even years before equivalent capabilities can be installed at their facilities.
