Applied Materials to build $4 billion R&D center in Silicon Valley
Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing equipment company, has said it will build a collaborative R&D centre at its headquarters campus.
The Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center is budgeted to cost $4 billion of incremental capital expenditure over the next seven years to help address the “angstrom era.” It is intended to be a focus for collaborative R&D with leading chip companies, including AMD, IBM, Intel, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, TSMC and Western Digital.
EPIC is also Applied’s bid to gain subsidy from the US government through provisions of the CHIPS and Science Act. The amount of subsidy sought was not declared but Applied said the scale of its investment depends on the level of support from the US government.
The innovation center is expected to be completed by early 2026 and become the nexus of more than $25 billion in company R&D spending over the first 10 years of operations. Once completed it will create up to 2,000 direct engineering jobs, Applied said.
Three football fields
The facility is expected to eventually include 180,000 square feet of cleanrooms – equivalent to three American football fields – for use by Applied engineers working alongside engineers from chipmakers, universities and ecosystem partners.
Chipmakers will be allowed to have their own dedicated space within an equipment supplier facility while gaining early access to next-generation technologies and tools – months or even years before equivalent capabilities can be installed at their facilities.
“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,” said Gary Dickerson, CEO of Applied Materials, in a statement.
EPIC will also serve as a bridge between academic research and commercial deployment bringing academic researchers in to validate ideas in commercial-grade processes and facilities. This will build upon Applied’s academic outrearch to engineering schools, such as Arizona State University, where Applied has been conducting research in materials science and semiconductor technology alongside faculty and students.
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