Leuven, Belgium, October 13, 2004--IMEC has signed strategic partnership agreements with ten of the world's leading equipment suppliers - AIXTRON (Aachen Germany), Applied Materials (Santa Clara, CA), ASM International (Bilthoven, The Netherlands), ASM-Lithography (Veldhoven, The Netherlands), Dainippon Screen (Kyoto, Japan), FEI Company (Hillsboro, OR), KLA-Tencor (San Jose, CA), Lam Research (Fremont, CA), Tokyo Electron (Tokyo, Japan) and SEZ (Zurich, Switzerland) - that allow IMEC to structure its sub-45nm research around their most advanced equipment, in return for enabling tool suppliers to acquire early know-how on future technology generations and closely collaborate with leading semiconductor manufacturers.
Integrated Circuit (IC) process research, targeting technology generations two to three nodes ahead of state-of-the-art IC production, requires close collaboration between research centers, semiconductor manufacturers, material suppliers and equipment manufacturers. At the inauguration of IMEC's nanoelectronics research facility last May, IMEC announced that seven of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers - Infineon Technologies (Munich, Germany), Intel (Santa Clara, CA), Matsushita (Kadoma, Japan), Philips (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), Samsung Electronics (Seoul, Korea), STMicroelectronics (Geneva, Switzerland) and Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) - had joined IMEC's sub-45nm research programs as core partners. Now agreements are in place with ten leading equipment suppliers to provide advanced equipment and to closely collaborate in IMEC's sub-45nm research programs.
The agreements allow IMEC to build its sub-45nm CMOS research programs around a mixture of early research tools (ß tools) and tools providing solid baseline processes. The equipment suppliers expect to station about 80 researchers at IMEC's facilities.