Elpida Memory, Inc. (Elpida), Japan's leading global supplier of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), has entered into a multi-year partnership with IMEC, Europe's leading independent nanoelectronics research center, to perform research and development for beyond 50nm DRAM process generations. With this agreement, four of the top five leading DRAM suppliers including Elpida, Micron, Samsung and Qimonda, collaborate within IMEC's global research platform, together with world leading logic IDMs and foundries.

Building on more than 20 years of experience on non-volatile memory research, IMEC extended in 2006 its sub-32nm CMOS research platform towards memory scaling. Thereby, IMEC's package of (sub-)32nm CMOS research programs addresses the challenges of both logic and memory-oriented roadmaps. The platform brings together the key semiconductor industry players from leading IDMs, foundries, memory companies, equipment and material suppliers with increasing participation of fabless and fablite companies.

From April 1, a team of researchers of Elpida will start collaborating closely with IMEC's researchers to build up fundamental understanding and to develop robust solutions for front-end-of-line memory technologies in order to perform research and development for beyond 50nm DRAM process generations.

"We are excited that Elpida has joined our research platform. We are convinced that their valuable know-how in memory scaling will be an important asset for our global research platform," said Prof. Gilbert Declerck, President and CEO of IMEC. "By concluding strong partnerships with different company clusters, both in logic and memory, IMEC aims to provide an answer to the needs and priorities of all the players in the semiconductor supply chain."

"R&D cost and the challenges to develop beyond 50nm DRAM process generations are increasing at rapid pace requiring research partnerships to ensure competitive time-to-market of new products," stated Mr. Sakamoto, President and CEO of Elpida. "By joining IMEC's large network of partners including the leading memory suppliers, we will be able to maintain our strong position in the DRAM market."

For more information:

Katrien Marent
Corporate Communication Manager
IMEC, Kapeldreef 75
B- 3001 Leuven, Belgium
Tel +32 16 28 18 80 Fax +32 16 28 16 37
Email: Katrien.Marent@imec.be