GLOBALFOUNDRIES to build R&D facility in New York

USA: GLOBALFOUNDRIES announced plans to build a new global R&D facility at its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, N.Y. The new Technology Development Center (TDC) is expected to play a key role in the company’s strategy to develop innovative semiconductor solutions allowing customers to compete at the leading edge of technology.

The TDC will feature more than a half million square feet of flexible space to support a range of technology development and manufacturing activities, including cleanroom and laboratory space.
Representing an investment of nearly $2 billion, the facility will increase the total capital investment for the Fab 8 campus to more than $8 billion. Construction of the TDC is planned to begin in early 2013 with completion targeted for late 2014. Since breaking ground on Fab 8 in 2009, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has created approximately 2,000 new direct jobs and that number is expected to grow by another 1,000 employees for a total of about 3,000 new jobs by the end of 2014.

The TDC will house a variety of semiconductor development and manufacturing spaces to support the transition to new technology nodes, as well as the development of innovative capabilities to deliver value to customers beyond the traditional approach of shrinking transistors.

The overarching goal of the TDC is to provide a collaborative space for GLOBALFOUNDRIES to develop end-to-end solutions covering the full spectrum of silicon technology, from new interconnect and packaging technologies that enable three-dimensional (3D) stacking of chips to leading-edge photomasks for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and everything in between.

“As the industry shifts from the PC era to a market focused on mobile devices, we have seen increasingly strong interest from customers in migrating to advanced nodes on an accelerated schedule,” said GLOBALFOUNDRIES CEO Ajit Manocha.

“To help facilitate this migration, we are making significant investments in strengthening our technology leadership, including growing our workforce and adding new capabilities to make Fab 8 the hub of our global technology operations. New York State’s continued support of the semiconductor industry has created a strong collaborative ecosystem and helped pave the way for this additional investment. The new TDC will help us bridge between the lab and the fab by taking research conducted with partners and further developing the technologies to make them ready for volume manufacturing.”

“This significant expansion demonstrates that the investments we have made in nanotechnology research across New York State are producing the intended return—the creation of high-paying jobs and generation of economic growth that is essential to rebuilding our state,” said Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.

“New York has become the world's hub for advanced semiconductor research and now, the Technology Development Center will further help ensure the innovations developed in New York, in collaboration with our research institutions, are manufactured in New York.”

“The future economic prosperity and security of the American economy depends on sustaining the nation’s capacity to innovate—that is, to translate our investments in research into new products for the market and new solutions for national missions,” said Dr. Charles W. Wessner, director of the National Academies’ Innovation Program.

“As a major new Academies’ report—Rising to the Challenge: US Innovation Policy for the Global Economy—has documented, other nations are focused on developing greater capacity to translate research into marketable products and we need to make smart investments to ensure innovation and manufacturing continue to be ‘made in America’. New York State’s public investments to develop CNSE as a hub of innovation coupled with the private investments of GLOBALFOUNDRIES are prime examples of best practices for public-private partnerships linking research, innovation and production that have made New York a globally recognized center of innovation.”

Located at the Luther Forest Technology Campus in the heart of upstate New York’s “Tech Valley,” Fab 8 is being developed as the most advanced semiconductor foundry campus in the world. Construction on the Fab 8 project began in July 2009 and the company has successfully brought up the new fab on schedule, hitting all major development, operations, and customer milestones.

The Fab 8 campus includes approximately two million square feet of development. In addition to investments in manufacturing production on established technology nodes, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has also been making significant investments in technology development at the Fab 8 campus, and today development is underway at the 20nm and 14nm technology nodes.

The Fab 8 campus is an ideal home for the company’s leading-edge technology development activities. The proximity of the IBM Joint Development Alliance activities in East Fishkill and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) at the University of Albany, combined with the growing presence of technology development personnel on the Fab 8 campus, have helped make New York’s “Tech Valley” a global center for next-generation technologies.