Highlights
- Fosters innovation through significant, long-term investments in R&D that extends beyond semiconductor technology alone
- Accelerates production readiness by providing early access to advanced semiconductor technologies
- Exploits experience from early, high volume production for process refinement
Semiconductor research, development and manufacturing, redefined
In an environment where technology challenges continue to grow as nodes shrink, how’s this for a semiconductor R&D model? Team with semiconductor industry leaders, universities, and state and local government. Co-locate experts in state-of-the-art research facilities. Share investments, resources and learning globally. And then do it successfully, year after year, to accelerate innovation and deliver differentiation.
For more than a decade, IBM and a strategic alliance of manufacturing, development and technology companies have worked together to push the boundaries of semiconductor technology to deliver real-world solutions. This collaboration, known as the Technology Development Alliance, has successfully delivered multiple generations of advanced bulk process technologies, including breakthrough high-k metal gate offerings.
Advanced R&D for the alliance is hosted across multiple facilities centered in the high-tech northeast corridor of North America, including the IBM Semiconductor R&D Center, East Fishkill, NY, the IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY and the NY State College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at Albany Nanotech. IBM taps into this pioneering R&D— innovation that goes beyond technology scaling alone, to materials, lithography and more—to bring faster, smaller, more cost-efficient and power-efficient semiconductor solutions to the marketplace.
Commercial availability of alliance technologies is accelerated through close collaboration with top electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) companies early in the development process so that tools and IP can be refined rather than retrofit for the technologies. Bulk offerings in 32/28 nm and previous technology nodes are already in volume production, and 22 nm/20 nm technology development work is nearing completion. Joint, dedicated resources are now focused on development of bulk-based FinFET technology in the 14 nm node, which extends process scaling benefits by taking advantage of three-dimensional device architectures for the next generation of low power, mobile-optimized technologies.
Collaborating to deliver differentiation beyond silicon
Leading EDA, design services, IP, packaging and test providers work closely with IBM and companies from both alliances to seamlessly develop and optimize semiconductor solutions that complement alliance silicon offerings. Because these solutions are specifically tuned for IBM and alliance process technologies, they can help customers keep pace with rising functionality and performance demands and reduce development time. And deliver tangible differentiation—across a variety of applications, from consumer products to the cloud.
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