Applied Materials (AMAT), the world's No. 1 maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, will see Taiwan's TSMC newly join its 7 trillion won-class research and development (R&D) collaboration hub being built in Silicon Valley. With TSMC joining Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron, the semiconductor industry's key players are effectively gathering under one roof.
On the 12th, AMAT said it will jointly pursue the development and commercialization of artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor technologies with TSMC, the world's No. 1 foundry, at its under-construction "EPIC Center." Scheduled to open this year, the EPIC Center is a facility in which $5 billion (about 7.2 trillion won) will be invested, the largest ever in the United States in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D.
Before news of TSMC's participation, in March the three memory leaders—Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron—had already announced they would join the center first. With TSMC now on board, the EPIC Center is set to establish itself as a collaborative platform that spans the full scope of semiconductor manufacturing, covering both memory and foundry.
The two companies plan to co-develop materials engineering, equipment innovation, and process-integration technologies at the EPIC Center to deliver energy-efficient performance from data centers to edge devices.
Gary Dickerson, AMAT's chairman and CEO, said, "By bringing our teams together at the EPIC Center, we will accelerate technology development to address the unprecedented complexity of the semiconductor manufacturing roadmap." Mi-Wu Jey, TSMC's senior vice president and co-chief operating officer (Co-COO), noted, "Industry-wide collaboration is essential to address AI challenges at global scale," adding, "The EPIC Center is an ideal environment to accelerate equipment and process readiness for next-generation technologies."