Viewpoint
February 19, 2013

Luc Van den hove, President and Chief Executive Officer, imec



Luc Van den hove, President and Chief Executive Officer, imec
Luc Van den hove, President and Chief Executive Officer, imec
From what we see now, what is planned and in the pipeline, the scaling roadmap has at least another decade to go. But of course, the more we enter the nanoscale domain, the more complex scaling becomes. More materials, more process steps, more equipment, more challenging concepts and device architectures. So we see all our partners reporting steeply rising development costs for new technology nodes.

So how will we cope as an R&D centre in 2013, how will we retain and strengthen our position? Our mission is to enable the scaling roadmap for our partners. Starting from that, we see a number of ways in which we can increase the value that we offer today.

One is that we will -- more than ever -- explore disruptive ideas for technologies that our partners will need three or more technology nodes from now. New transistor architectures, new materials, new types of memory, …

And for the imminent technology nodes, we’ll accelerate our efforts in process integration. This includes increasing our speed of experimenting. We see our partners asking for more experiments, more steps, more wafer throughput. We are putting the people and tools in place to make that possible, in a really disruptive way.

And last, as an R&D provider of the major IDMs, we plan to build a new cleanroom for a 450mm pilot line. This cleanroom should be ready for equipment installation end 2015. In the coming years, and as tools become available, we’ll shift more and more of our development work to 450mm tools.

Luc Van den hove, President and Chief Executive Officer
imec
http://www.imec.be
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