Applied Materials unveiled its EPIC Center on October 12, a $5 billion R&D facility on its campus in Sunnyvale, California. The company says it’s the world’s largest facility dedicated to semiconductor equipment and process technology R&D.
That price tag comes with a footnote. Applied says capital spending is expected to scale over time to approximately $5 billion as customer projects commence.
Measured in School Buses
Applied calls EPIC one of the most complex R&D construction projects in the world. Here’s the scale, per the company:
600,000 square feet of structure
Nearly four acres of advanced cleanroom space
More than six million construction hours
Enough foundation concrete to fill 34 Olympic swimming pools
Enough steel to build two Eiffel Towers
34 roof trusses over the cleanrooms, each spanning nearly 300 feet and weighing as much as 12 school buses
Design-Build, Chip Edition
In the traditional model, foundational materials research, equipment and process development, and process integration and pilot production each happen in a separate environment. Every phase ends with a careful handoff.
EPIC is designed to remove those handoffs. It puts the people who invent the materials, build the equipment and make the chips together in one facility.
Think of it as design-build for semiconductors, with everyone at the table from the start. Applied says that because customers’ engineers help optimize the technology before it reaches their factory, it arrives at the fab ready to ramp to high performance and high yield sooner.
The Roster
Founding partners: TSMC, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Micron and SK hynix
Innovation partners: Broadcom, Advantest, SCREEN, KIOXIA and Besi
Research partners: Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
Keep an eye on that footnote. Applied ties the full $5 billion to customer projects getting underway, so EPIC’s real test is the work that moves through it, not the steel that went into it.
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