Intel and Applied Materials to collaborate on chip manufacturing advancements

Work will take place at the companies' respective R&D facilities

Intel has partnered with Applied Materials to drive future developments in the semiconductor manufacturing space.

According to the companies, the collaboration will span front-end and back-end-of-line advancements, with work to be undertaken at both Intel’s R&D campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Applied’s EPIC (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) Center in Silicon Valley, a semiconductor R&D facility slated to open later this year.

The partnership will focus on next-generation transistors, interconnect scaling, and the development of advanced packaging technologies for Foveros-based 3D stacking to support higher interconnect density, improved power delivery, and enhanced thermal performance for high-performance compute platforms necessary for agentic AI workloads.

“With the chipmaking roadmap becoming more complex at each process node, accelerating innovations in semiconductor devices, interconnects and packaging requires deeper collaboration across R&D and manufacturing,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, president of the semiconductor products group at Applied Materials. “We look forward to working closely with Intel as a founding partner of the EPIC Center to shorten development cycles and bring new technologies to market faster.”

Naga Chandrasekaran, EVP, chief technology and operations officer and GM of Intel Foundry, added: “Accelerating our R&D to keep pace with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure is critical to delivering the technology, manufacturing excellence and foundry services our customers expect from Intel Foundry. Applied Materials’ new EPIC Center provides an environment where our teams can collaborate even more closely and at higher velocity to accelerate materials development and process innovations.”

Earlier this year, Applied announced it was partnering with SK Hynix to co-develop and deploy next-generation DRAM and high-bandwidth memory at its $5 billion EPIC R&D facility in Silicon Valley.