Samsung’s collaboration with ASML and imec Is Increased

Samsung Vice Chairman and de facto CEO Lee Jae-yong met ASML in the Netherlands and imec in Belgium. The manufacturer wants to intensify its collaboration with the two currently quite exclusive technology heavyweights in order to remain at the forefront of the semiconductor industry in the future.

Strengthen and expand collaboration

It is no coincidence that Samsung is mainly looking for proximity to ASML: Samsung is already one of the largest customers of the Dutch supplier of factory equipment, but wants to remain so in the future and possibly even expand – and the demand for exposure technology from ASLM is amazing. A few years ago, Samsung, like TSMC and Intel, had even larger shares in ASML, but later sold it again with a small remnant.

ASML High NA EUV

At ASLM, future technology means not just EUV, but high-NA-EUV (details in the article Chip Manufacturing: What’s Behind EUV Lithography?). The next step in production technology is pending, Intel is the first manufacturer to have already ordered multiple systems.

With a unit price of around 400 million euros in the final version, these machines are only for the really big manufacturers on the market. So did Samsung, Lee Jae-yong took a closer look at one of these systems at ASML’s factories. It was not stated whether an order was placed immediately.

Fundamental research by imec

But in Europe, there is not only ASML in the Netherlands as one of the most important players in the industry, but also imec from Belgium. As with IBM in the US, a lot of fundamental research is done there. For example, the current topic is the future modified power supply of transistors from behind.

Here too, Intel has already gone public with the approach called PowerVia, At the start of the week, imec presented its own revised approach for “Backside Power Delivery” Research has been going on for years and the first results were presented in 2019. Products in “2 nm”, as it is called in the marketing departments of companies, should be able to use these innovations.

This topic should not be underestimated, as Applied Materials (with material from imec) recently explained in a presentation. Different approaches go in the same direction and ultimately promise significant bonuses. Mutual grades can achieve a simpler process in production or the best result with a correspondingly complex production.