Intermolecular and GLOBALFOUNDRIES sign broad collaborative development and IP licensing agreement

SAN JOSE, USA: Intermolecular Inc. will collaborate with GLOBALFOUNDRIES on research and development of a wide range of semiconductor process technologies. Under a newly signed multiyear Collaborative Development Program (CDP) and intellectual property (IP) licensing agreement, GLOBALFOUNDRIES will leverage Intermolecular’s High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) technology to accelerate the creation of process modules that will be integrated into GLOBALFOUNDRIES manufacturing lines worldwide.

“Our business model is built on collaboration, both in customer engagement and technology development,” said Gregg Bartlett, GLOBALFOUNDRIES senior VP of Technology and Research and Development. “This new collaboration with Intermolecular will bolster our R&D pipeline and be an important enhancement to our ability to rapidly address integration challenges and transfer IP-protected solutions into high-volume manufacturing. We’re especially pleased to work with Intermolecular to accelerate development not just for our most advanced technology nodes, but also for mature production lines, where we provide a wide variety of scalable plug-in modules to help our customers meet the widest possible range of market opportunities.”

Much of the development work will be performed at Intermolecular’s HPC R&D Center in San Jose, California, in close collaboration with GLOBALFOUNDRIES operations in Germany, New York, California, and Singapore.

Intermolecular’s HPC technology enables generation and analysis of experimental data with significantly greater speed and efficiency than a traditional development line. Researchers and engineers from both companies will work side by side, utilizing Intermolecular’s full suite of Tempus wet-workflow development systems and Tempus AP-30 platforms, which can perform ALD, CVD and PVD deposition processes.

These tools enable tens to over a hundred individual experiments to be run in parallel, with proprietary high-throughput test and characterization equipment providing rapid insights into physical and electrical properties of experimental materials, processes, and device architectures. Intermolecular’s Informatics software allows rapid analysis of the resulting data, and quick identification of the most promising results.

“We’re very excited to be working with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, and look forward to accelerating their ability to develop and ramp high-value manufacturing technologies,” said David Lazovsky, Intermolecular president and CEO. “This is an extensive and diverse engagement, covering technology nodes from 45 nanometers down to 14 nanometers, spanning multiple process and device integration applications. The objective of our collaboration with GLOBALFOUNDRIES is to strengthen and accelerate their customer product offerings for markets that require leading-edge, high-performance, low-power, volume manufacturing capabilities.”