Mar. 15, 2007 — Elpida Memory, Inc., Japanese supplier of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) to the world market, has entered into a multi-year partnership with the independent European nanoelectronics research center, IMEC, to perform research and development for beyond 50nm DRAM process generations.

Collaboration will begin April 1. With this agreement, four of the top five DRAM suppliers (Elpida, Micron, Samsung, and Qimonda), collaborate within IMEC’s global research platform, together with world leading logic integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) and foundries.

Building on more than 20 years of experience on non-volatile memory research, the Belgium-based IMEC recently extended its sub-32nm CMOS research platform towards memory scaling to address the challenges of both logic and memory-oriented roadmaps.

Earlier this month, the Flemish Minister of Science and Innovation signed a new frame agreement between IMEC and the Government of Flanders for the period 2007-2011. As part of the agreement, IMEC’s annual research grant will amount to 38.909 million euro, an increase of 11% over 2006. The grant will increase by another 4.375 million euro on January 1, 2008 resulting in a total increase of 20% compared to 2006.

IMEC says that its strategic decisions, including fast deployment of its 300mm research infrastructure and strengthening of its multi-disciplinary research, were critical success factors.

IMEC anticipates the semiconductor market will move toward technologies that allow increasing the functionality of systems without necessarily scaling transistor dimensions. To this end, IMEC is combining conventional CMOS base processes (130nm/90nm) of the 200mm pilot line with additional process modules and devices, and developing application-specific demonstrators as proof of concept. This will result in more intensive collaborations with industry in advanced packaging and interconnection technologies, bio(medical) electronics, GaN power devices, large-area organic electronics, and more.

In 2006, 1489 expert researchers worked at IMEC, including 22% guest researchers and residents from academia and industry. In 2007, IMEC will hire about 100 more, ranging from process and hardware technicians and engineers, operators, finance and legal experts, to researchers, both at junior and senior level.