Applied Materials and A*Star invest US$210m in research on heterogenous integration over 5 years

AMERICAN chipmaker Applied Materials and an A*Star research institute have extended their research collaboration and will make a new combined investment of about US$210 million over 5 years.

This will bring the total investment between Applied Materials and the Institute of Microelectronics (IME), which is under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) to US$460 million, since the collaboration began 10 years ago, the two organisations said in a joint media briefing.

The fresh funds will be used to add 3,500 square feet of new laboratory space as well as expand the research team's headcount by 20 per cent from the current 150-strong team, said Terence Gan, executive director-designate at IME.

Stressing that semiconductor research is multidisciplinary, Gan said they will be hiring talents from a variety of fields including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering and mechanical engineering.

Both Applied Materials and IME expressed confidence in hiring local talent, especially given that the semiconductor industry, the largest manufacturing sector here, currently employs more than 30,000 people.

Both parties will also upgrade and expand the Centre of Excellence in Advanced Packaging in Singapore to accelerate materials, equipment and process technology solutions for hybrid bonding and other emerging 3D chip integration technologies, according to a joint statement.

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This third phase of their research collaboration focuses on heterogenous integration and advanced packaging solutions to enable continued advances in power, performance, area, cost and time-to-market (PPACt).

"The traditional role of packaging is to protect the delicate semiconductor chip from physical damage and to provide electrical connections to connect the chip with the printed circuit board," said Gan.

However, over the years, the industry had been investing in making transistors smaller in a bid to deliver PPACt, and this has become increasingly challenging in accordance to Moore's law.

"In this third phase, what we are going to make possible is to manufacture a big chip - not as one single chip as they do today, but as what we call chiplets and then use our packaging technology to create the thousands to millions of fine interconnects between the chiplets," Gan said.

He added that this would give companies the freedom to source for chiplets from different suppliers, helping to increase supply chain resilience.

Arvind Sundarrajan, managing director and head of the applied packaging development centre in Singapore at Applied Materials, said applied packaging is becoming more and more sophisticated, and this requires access to a number of tools.

"Some of these tools, Applied Materials manufactures and fabricates. There are several other tools in the integration flow that we require access to and that is provided by IME," said Dr Arvind, adding that the institute has other non-applied tools as well as expertise in the area, making them an important local partner.

Brian Tan, vice president of applied global services and regional president of Southeast Asia at Applied Materials, noted that the three research and development laboratories in Singapore have, over the last 10 years, launched 6 advanced products for its global customers.

He added that A*Star, which acts as a bridge, helps the company connect to the local ecosystem, including research institutes as well as plugging it to the supply chain as well.

Alfred Huan, assistant chief executive of the science and engineering research council at A*Star said: "There'll be a great demand for chips because of the AI era of computing, chips with different functionalities, and the easier way is to organise them as chips through heterogenous integration, rather than through building a single monolithic kind of system... what we're going to do in the next five years will put us really in the forefront for this demand of chips."