Intermolecular Speeds R&D for Elpida’s Next-Gen Memory

Intermolecular Inc. (San Jose) today announced a new collaborative development program (CDP) and licensing agreement with Elpida Memory Inc. (Tokyo) to enable rapid development of new materials and process technologies for Elpida’s next-generation memory chips.

Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media -- Semiconductor International, 7/15/2008 12:37:00 AM

Intermolecular Inc. (San Jose) today announced a new collaborative development program (CDP) and licensing agreement with Elpida Memory Inc. (Tokyo) to enable rapid development of new materials and process technologies for Elpida’s next-generation memory chips. The CDP will use Intermolecular's physical vapor deposition (PVD) and atomic layer deposition (ALD) workflows and applications.

The program will be based in Intermolecular’s San Jose facility, but will involve close collaboration among both teams. Intermolecular’s informatics web-based software system serves to unify R&D workflows, providing for automated generation and execution of experiments, design and tracking of experimental splits and the associated metrology and e-test data, and use of statistical best-known methods to automatically analyze and interpret data and generate reports.

The CDP is based on Intermolecular’s High-Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) technology, which accelerates R&D learning cycles by an order of magnitude, according to David Lazovsky, Intermolecular’s CEO. A key strategy in this methodology is asking and answering only the questions that are necessary at each stage of development, he said, which makes the process more manageable and thus quicker.

Intermolecular’s HPC methodology is based on asking and answering only the questions necessary at each stage of development.

Compared with the days of straightforward dimensional scaling, when the burden of development rested primarily with lithography, it has become increasingly difficult to move R&D as quickly as it needs to progress in this age of relying on new materials for further advances, Lazovsky explained. It’s important to identify as quickly as possible where the dead ends are, he said, and the previous R&D strategy became unmanageable.

“At the end of the day, experimental data is the only way to move ideas into production,” Lazovsky said. And that is where Intermolecular comes in, running, testing and analyzing experimental data at a rate 100× faster than conventional learning can be done by an IC manufacturer. The company’s Tempus HPC platform enables high-speed development, integration and electrical testing of a large number of alternative solution sets. Based on massively parallel processing, characterization and informatics, the PVD and ALD systems that are part of the Tempus HPC platform deliver faster R&D learning.

“This partnership with Intermolecular will significantly broaden and accelerate the scope of materials evaluation and process integration for our advanced memory technologies,” said Takao Adachi, director and CTO of Elpida’s Future Technology Development Office, in a statement.

Intermolecular has gathered much of its knowledge of accelerated learning cycles from other industries, such as pharmaceutical and biotech, including an important alliance with Symyx Technologies. Intermolecular is the only company that provides fully integrated combinatorial R&D technology to the semiconductor industry.

Intermolecular showed positive cash flow last year, in just its third year in business. It had 2007 bookings of $55M, and expects to see 300% growth in 2008. The company was scheduled to ship several HPC workflows to customers throughout the year, to locations in the United States, Taiwan, Japan and Korea.