imec brings Globalfoundries into its research community

According to the companies, stt-mram technology is a promising high density alternative to existing memory technologies. Imec and its partners will explore stt-mram's potential, including performance at better than 1ns and scalability beyond 10nm for embedded and standalone applications. "Innovation in next generation memory is required to give chip designers new options to continue to deliver leading edge products with higher performance, lower power consumption and better bandwidth," said Globalfoundries' chief technology officer Gregg Bartlett. "This new partnership with imec will enable close collaboration with customers, partners, and the supplier community to help reduce the risk in bringing this new memory technology to market." Meanwhile, imec and Qualcomm Technologies have extended their collaboration agreement to accelerate scaling technologies for logic and memory devices. Under the agreement, Qualcomm Technologies will gain insight into all advanced process technologies under investigation at imec to help shape its future product roadmaps. "We continue to invest heavily into technology leadership, which includes advanced semiconductor technologies" said Jim Thompson, executive vice president of engineering at Qualcomm. "We have collaborated with imec on the 3d stacking program for the last four years and look forward to expanding our engagement to include cmos research and the new mram programme." "Strong collaboration between foundries, IDMs, fabless and fablite companies, packaging and assembly companies, and equipment and material suppliers at imec play a critical role in pushing forward the development of innovative solutions," claimed Luc Van den hove, imec's president and ceo.