Applied Materials Inc is planning to spend as much as US$4 billion on a new research and development (R&D) center near its California headquarters, embarking on a now-rare building project in the heart of Silicon Valley.
The Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center on Applied Materials’ campus in Santa Clara would be the biggest R&D facility in the semiconductor industry, the company said yesterday.
Applied Materials is the largest maker of chip-manufacturing equipment, and the project would let the firm and its customers rapidly develop new production techniques.
Photo: Reuters / Applied Materials Inc
Like many of the industry’s construction projects these days, the effort is also a bid to tap government funding. The US’ CHIPS and Science Act, passed last year, is to allocate roughly US$52 billion to help revitalize domestic R&D and manufacturing, and companies are angling to benefit from the windfall.
Applied Materials’ ambitions with the new center would hinge on how much assistance it gets, CEO Gary Dickerson said in an interview.
“The scale and pace of what we do is dependent on incentives,” he said.
The company chose to build in Silicon Valley — a place that has become too costly and burdensome for most new chip facilities — because of the proximity to many companies with an interest in semiconductors, he said.
Intel Corp, Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc are all based in the city, about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco.
The new facility is designed to speed up improvements in the way that semiconductors are made, helping the chip business grow into a trillion-dollar market this decade.
The EPIC Center, whose name is short for equipment and process innovation and commercialization, would let chip manufacturers try out new machinery in something close to a complete production line. That should make it faster and easier to fine-tune new production technologies.
At the same time, academic institutions would have access to cutting-edge gear for research, Dickerson said.
The overall aim is to cut down on the 10 to 15 years that it takes academic research to make it to the factory floor.
The center would also help attract and train the workers that the industry needs to run plants and design chips, he said.
Dickerson said that the project is needed to help overcome daunting new technical challenges and maintain the pace of chip advancement — what he calls one of humankind’s greatest engineering achievements.
A state-of-the-art chip crams 96.5km of wiring connecting 15 billion transistors into an area that is 10 millimeters across. Some of the layers of materials deposited to create that structure are only four atoms deep.
Building the new facility would lead to an increase in Applied Materials’ capital spending over the next few years, but the company has said that its investments would not affect its ability to fund dividends and share repurchases.
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