Applied Materials opened a $5B research facility in Silicon Valley intended to shorten the time it takes to develop new chipmaking processes.
The Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization Center gives the industry a shared development space where engineers from different companies work on manufacturing technology together.
The facility addresses a structural problem. Developing a new process step has historically taken up to a decade, spanning equipment design, materials work and integration testing across several firms that each guard their own data.
AI demand has compressed the timeline everyone is working against. Larger models need more compute, more compute needs denser silicon, and denser silicon requires manufacturing advances that the current development cycle cannot deliver fast enough.
Applied’s business sits upstream of the chipmakers. It sells the deposition, etching and inspection equipment that fabs rely on, so a bottleneck in process development is a bottleneck in its own order book.
Chief executive Gary Dickerson said the center is meant to accelerate that research, according to comments to the New York Post.
Sharing a facility does not resolve the underlying tension, since the companies collaborating on process steps also compete on the products those steps enable.
