Applied Materials, Inc. announced that Samsung Electronics will join the new, $5 billion EPIC Center in Silicon Valley. Applied’s EPIC Center will open this year as the world’s largest and most advanced facility for collaborative semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment R&D.
“The global buildout of AI infrastructure is driving unprecedented demand for energy-efficient chips,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “To keep up with the tremendous pace of innovation in semiconductors, our industry must rethink and re-engineer how we collaborate to deliver the next generation of manufacturing technologies. Samsung will join Applied Materials at the EPIC Center, where our teams will work side-by-side to accelerate the path to bring advanced technologies to market faster than ever before.”
“Samsung and Applied Materials continue to build on our long-standing partnership to advance leading-edge semiconductor equipment technologies," said Young Hyun Jun, Vice Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics. "We look forward to further deepening the technological collaboration between our two companies at the new EPIC center.”
“With the ever-increasing complexity of advanced semiconductors, parallel development of key steps throughout the entire process flow is critical to drive device performance, yield and cost, and that is exactly what the EPIC Center is designed to do,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. “We are honored to have Samsung Electronics as the first founding member, and we are excited to demonstrate the unique capabilities of the EPIC Center as a new innovation engine for the semiconductor ecosystem.”
The co-development programs at the EPIC Center will be designed to fast-track the development and deployment of next-generation semiconductor technologies through high-velocity co-innovation. The joint R&D programs will target new materials and process technologies for chips multiple nodes ahead of the current generation. The co-development programs will target new atomic‑scale innovations for advanced patterning, etch and deposition processes to enable a new generation of devices across advanced logic and memory chips.
Applied’s EPIC (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) Center in Silicon Valley represents the largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D and is designed from the ground up to dramatically reduce the time it takes to commercialize breakthrough technologies from early-stage research to full-scale manufacturing. It does this by increasing speed, accuracy and efficiency through tighter collaboration and faster cycles of learning.
With state of the art cleanroom space for collaborative R&D, the facility is on track to become operational in 2026. A traditional chip development cycle is a serial compartmentalized process, but the EPIC model and infrastructure will drastically reduce that time, enabling parallel development, agile handoffs and early access to next-generation processes across the ecosystem. This accelerates product roadmaps, increases commercial success rates and amplifies the return on R&D investments.
