Founding partnership at Silicon Valley’s EPIC Centre targets advanced Foveros 3D packaging, power delivery, and transistor engineering.
Intel Foundry and Applied Materials have entered into a multi-site process technology collaboration spanning front-end and back-end semiconductor manufacturing, including transistor engineering, advanced packaging, interconnects, and power delivery architecture.
The joint engineering effort will take place across Intel’s primary R&D campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Applied Materials’ upcoming Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Centre in Silicon Valley. A core focus will centre on advancing Foveros 3D packaging technologies to drive higher interconnect density and enhance thermal and power efficiency for high-performance computing required by agentic AI models.
Framing the research mandate, Dr Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials, stated: “With the chipmaking roadmap becoming more complex at each process node, accelerating innovations in semiconductor devices, interconnects and packaging requires deeper collaboration across R&D and manufacturing. We look forward to working closely with Intel as a founding partner of the EPIC Centre to shorten development cycles and bring new technologies to market faster.”
Echoing the operational imperative for Intel Foundry, Naga Chandrasekaran, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, noted: “Accelerating our R&D to keep pace with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure is critical to delivering the technology, manufacturing excellence and foundry services our customers expect from Intel Foundry. Applied Materials’ new EPIC Centre provides an environment where our teams can collaborate even more closely and at higher velocity to accelerate materials development and process innovations.”
The alliance follows similar ecosystem moves by Applied Materials, which recently partnered with SK Hynix on next-generation DRAM and HBM development alongside exploratory discussions regarding a memory joint venture at Intel’s Ohio fab site.
