September 29, 2005 – IBM Corp., Applied Materials, and Albany NanoTech in New York have agreed to begin a five-year, $300 million R&D and economic outreach program, bringing in more than 100 engineers to work on six areas of next-generation chip technology: 300mm epitaxial substrates, ultralow-k dielectrics, atomic-layer deposition, chemical-mechanical polishing, copper plating, and ultrafine ion implantation technology for nanoscale semiconductor devices (e.g. ultrashallow junctions).

Research will be conducted using existing 300mm operations at Albany. A new 30,000 sq. ft cleanroom is expected to be ready for equipment move-in by December, and the goal is to begin processing by April 2006.

Albany Nanotech is now home to six ongoing consortia R&D projects. Back in July, a $600 million “international lithography venture” (INVENT) project was launched by Albany NanoTech with IBM, AMD, Infineon, and Micron, to develop immersion and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography applications. Other R&D work ongoing at Albany includes SEMATECH North (EUV infrastructure, masks, and resists); Tokyo Electron’s R&D center; an IBM/ASML-led project also for lithography; and other partnership work between IBM and Albany. IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Infineon, AMD, and Chartered also spearheaded a $1.9 billion commitment in January to upgrade 300mm facilities at East Fishkill, NY. — J.M.