Targeting silicon geometries below 50nm, German research powerhouse Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Infineon Technologies, Advanced Micro Devices and the Federal Government of Saxony officially opened the Fraunhofer Center for Nanoelectronic Technology (CNT) in Dresden on Tuesday.

Last August, the partners signed the memorandum of understanding for the establishment of the CNT in a public-private partnership to develop new process technologies for nanoelectronics, as the leap from microelectronics to nanoelectronics is a big challenge for the semiconductor industry.

“The Fraunhofer Center for Nanoelectronic Technology is exemplary for a new way of interlocking science and production,” said Alfred Gossner, member of the Frauhofer-Gesellschaft’s executive board, in a statement.

“It is only possible with the mutual efforts of science and industry that we have a chance here in Germany to be actively involved in the development of such huge technological challenges like the transition to nanoelectronics,” he added.

The focus of the CNT is to expand the Fraunhofer alliance microelectronics competences in cooperation with leading semiconductor manufacturers in the field of technology development, the partners said.

As such, the CNT is part of the European initiative European Nanoelectronic Initiative Advisory Council (ENIAC), in place to strengthen the field of nanoelectronics.

The CNT, being compared to IMEC in Belgium and LETI in France, will directly collaborate with the industry and is the European answer to initiatives like Sematech in the U.S. and Selete in Japan.

The center contains clean-room facilities with a surface area of 800 square meters, as well as an infrastructure that complies with industry standards, with the goal to make maximum usage of the synergies between science, development and the manufacturing of process technologies for nanoelectronics at the facility in Dresden.

“This research platform gives us the opportunity to develop innovative process solutions fast and efficiently and to transfer them directly into the manufacturing environment,” said Andreas von Zitzewitz, board member of Infineon, in the statement. “Given the short life cycles of products and technology within a cyclical semiconductor industry and taking the rapidly augmenting development costs into consideration this is one of the most critical tasks, which can be solved preferably through close cooperation in research and development."

With Infineon’s 300mm DRAM production already under way and AMD’s two microprocessor facilities, the partners believe Dresden offers excellent local conditions for a cooperative research platform for nanoelectronics.

In the CNT’s clean-room facilities Infineon and AMD, in cooperation with Fraunhofer researchers, the technical university of Dresden and other institutes will be able to develop process technologies for the manufacturing of nanoelectronics.

The CNT said it is open to cooperation with materials and equipment manufacturers.

Industry partners and government will invest a total of $860 million (700 million euros) in the expansion of the nanoelectronics location in Germany.

The contract agreement for the CNT is valid for five years initially, with mutual evaluation to take place at the end of this time.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the industry partners are aiming at operating a permanently working research platform dependent on development of the markets and of supporting R&D measures.

The CNT will focus on the processing of selected steps for the manufacturing of high-density memory components as well as high-performance transistors, to which the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft brings competences of it's institutes in the fields of material and deposition systems, basic processes, assembly and packaging, design technologies and lithography.

By: DocMemory
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