I got a taste of this myself many years ago when I was an executive at AMD. The amount of work and expertise required at each stage is honestly staggering, and in some ways it’s no wonder that the whole cycle can take 10 to 15 years to play out.
In this environment, after a critical mass of fundamental research in a new area has been done, the process development experts can begin to work in parallel with the physicists, materials scientists, electrical engineering professors and other researchers. And then when the time is right, the process engineers will work alongside the implementation pros who know how to get new processes implemented in commercial fabs.
It’s also great for the universities involved. When I talked with Tristan Holtam, group vice president for corporate strategy and development and chief of staff to Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson, he was eloquent about the vital role of universities in maintaining the strength of the semiconductor ecosystem in the U.S.
All of these companies, even the ones that don’t make their own chips, stand to benefit from EPIC’s work. By the end of this decade, Applied predicts that the global semiconductor market will pass $1 trillion in annual revenue—about twice as much as today. Many of the new technologies driving that growth will rely on chip production techniques that are orders of magnitude more complex than the ones that have brought us to this point.