Enabling the equipment and materials supplier ecosystem for AI

As semiconductor scaling becomes increasingly complex, equipment and materials innovation is under growing pressure. New process steps, materials, and integration schemes must be validated far earlier in the technology development cycle, often before clear high-volume manufacturing pathways are established. At the same time, suppliers face limited access to system-level roadmaps, fragmented feedback loops, and a lack of neutral environments to demonstrate performance in realistic conditions.

This creates a fundamental challenge: how can new capabilities be evaluated, benchmarked, and de-risked in a way that reflects future industry needs rather than isolated component performance? And how can suppliers generate credible, system-relevant evidence of impact without being constrained by bilateral or competitive dynamics?

Addressing these questions requires environments that bring together diverse stakeholders, enable pre-competitive experimentation, and support the generation of high-quality demonstration data under representative process flows. Such environments must bridge early research and industrial deployment, allowing new concepts to be tested, compared, and iterated in a context aligned with evolving technology roadmaps.

In this context, imec plays a unique role - bringing together equipment and materials suppliers, IDMs, and foundries in a neutral, collaborative environment, enabling early validation in industrially relevant conditions and supporting the generation of high-quality, system-relevant demonstration data that can accelerate industry-wide adoption of next-generation technologies.