Applied Materials opens new $5 billion chip research facility to accelerate collaborative semiconductor innovation

Semiconductor industry giant Applied Materials Inc. today opened the doors to its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization Center, a massive new $5 billion facility in Silicon Valley designed to enable the next wave of breakthroughs in the commercial chip manufacturing industry.

The so-called new EPIC Center was built by Applied to provide the industry with a shared research and development facility where some of the world’s brightest engineers can collaborate on new process manufacturing technologies.

The launch comes at a critical time. As artificial intelligence infrastructure expands and frontier models become more powerful, computing power requirements are putting enormous pressure on the chip manufacturing industry.

Chip roadmaps have become more complex than ever as chipmakers race to innovate on more sophisticated processors that can accelerate computing performance and deliver power savings beyond what current-generation silicon can deliver. Traditionally, the research and development process for new chip technologies can take up to a decade, but that is not enough in an industry that is evolving as quickly as AI.

Applied CEO Gary Dickerson told the New York Post in an interview that the EPIC Center aims to accelerate these research processes as much as possible. The facility, which houses enough steel to build two Eiffel Towers, spans more than 600,000 square meters and houses nearly four hectares of cleanroom space to support parallel, cross-industry research and development under one roof and shorten new innovation cycles.

“There are five to ten key technologies that determine performance and yield [of semiconductors]“It’s just a matter of how we can speed this all up,” Dickerson told the Post. The goal is to reduce overall cycle time by at least 30%, thereby reducing time to market. This is of enormous value.”

Inside, Applied engineers plan to work with their counterparts from some of the world’s largest chipmakers on projects aimed at co-optimizing new technologies such as 3D architectures, advanced packaging techniques, low-resistance cabling and hybrid bonding. The facility’s founding partners are a veritable who’s who of the chipmaking industry, including heavyweights such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Micron Technology Inc. and SK hynix Inc.

There are also a number of “innovation partners” that will also help, including Broadcom Inc. and Advantest Corp. as well as academic researchers from universities such as Stanford University and the Universities of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan agreed with Dickerson that the chipmaking industry urgently needs to collaborate on transistors, interconnects and advanced packaging if it wants to capitalize on what he said is a multitrillion-dollar AI computing opportunity.

“We see a path to more than a trillion transistors in one package by 2030,” he said. “As architectures become more complex and R&D costs continue to rise, we need to move faster and work more closely with our equipment partners. EPIC gives our teams the opportunity to work side-by-side with Applied on materials and process innovations so we can accelerate development, improve R&D efficiency and bring new technologies to market faster.”

Dr. Prabu Raja, president of Applied’s Semiconductor Products Group, said this collaborative development approach will significantly accelerate the process of commercializing new technologies.

“At today’s atomic scale, many materials and material interfaces behave in entirely new ways, and making them work on an industrial scale requires coordinated development and integrated solutions,” he explained. “EPIC is the only place where materials, process technology and equipment are innovated in parallel, increasing the success rate of new materials and technologies. Because our customers’ own engineers help optimize the technology before it ever reaches their factory, what leaves EPIC arrives at the factory faster, ready to ramp up to high performance and high yield.”

Dickerson told the Post that the EPIC Center could help researchers shorten the life cycles of new developments by at least 30%, saying this was critical to reducing the enormous energy demands that AI computation has placed on the world. “It is absolutely necessary,” he said. “They improve energy-efficient data processing many times over compared to where we are today. It is many times better than where we are today.”

Dickerson declined to discuss specific research projects currently underway at the EPIC Center, but promised that some of the early breakthroughs will have significant impacts on health care, industrial production and education, as well as electronic devices such as smartphones and computers. “You’re going to see new consumer devices that go beyond the smartphone that I have some insight into that will change how people interact and people interact with the world,” he said.

Photos: Applied Materials