Applied Materials and TSMC have announced a partnership to develop semiconductor technologies for the next phase of AI scaling at the former’s EPIC Centre in Silicon Valley. The collaboration will focus on materials engineering, equipment innovation, and process integration technologies to improve energy-efficient chip performance from data centres to edge devices.
The investment for EPIC Centre was announced in 2023 to accelerate the commercialisation of next-generation semiconductor technologies. Applied has stated that the centre represents a planned investment of about $5 billion over time and will become operationally ready this year. The company described the facility as its largest investment in semiconductor equipment research and development in the United States.
Applied Materials stated that the partnership builds on more than 30 years of collaboration between the two firms and aims to reduce the time taken to move new technologies from research to high-volume manufacturing.
Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials, said that TSMC, as a founding partner of the EPIC Center, would gain earlier access to Applied Materials’ innovation teams and next-generation equipment.
Applied Materials said the partnership will target challenges linked to advanced logic scaling as AI workloads increase. The companies plan to work on process technologies that improve power, performance and area efficiency across leading-edge logic nodes.
Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials, said that bringing teams together at the EPIC Center would help accelerate the technologies needed to address the growing complexity of chipmaking.
The companies also plan to develop advanced process integration approaches to improve yield, variability control and reliability as semiconductor devices move towards vertically stacked architectures. They will also focus on new materials and manufacturing equipment for complex 3D transistors and interconnect structures.
“As semiconductor device architectures evolve with each new generation, the demands on materials engineering and process integration continue to increase,” said Y.J. Mii, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at TSMC. He said large-scale AI development requires broader industry collaboration and described the EPIC Center as an environment that can accelerate the readiness of equipment and processes for next-generation technologies.
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