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Lam Research Corp. announced that it intends to invest more than $3 billion over the next five years to expand its global research and development (R&D) lab network. The planned multi-site expansion is expected to add infrastructure and capabilities to increase experiment capacity by more than 50%. Lam's R&D approach combines specialized labs worldwide, each purpose-built to accelerate a distinct step of the innovation cycle, with deep customer collaboration that includes locations near customer facilities. Together, Lam's labs operate as an integrated 24/7 network, enabling innovation in parallel and at scale. With this investment, Lam intends to further compress product development cycles for customers, from pathfinding to fab deployment.
"In the AI era, the pace of innovation is relentless, requiring chips with new architectures, different materials, and complex features engineered with nanoscale precision. Our ability to increase velocity throughout the R&D process has become a decisive advantage," said Tim Archer, president and chief executive officer of Lam Research. "We are investing with the intention of staying ahead of what our customers need, further strengthening our global innovation engine to deliver the next generation of semiconductor breakthroughs."
Lam's global lab network spans the United States, Asia, and Europe. The combined R&D infrastructure supports more than one million experiments annually. Facilities specialized for foundational research in new chemistries, materials and mechatronics have the capability to compress weeks of experimental work into as little as a few days in many cases. Process development labs carry those advances toward production readiness, with engineering, product development and manufacturing teams working side by side on the same tools. Located in proximity to customers, Lam's technology centers support rapid qualification and validation alongside customers' engineering teams.
The integrated lab network enables tools, data and expertise to be shared across locations and time zones, so a discovery in one lab becomes knowledge every lab can use. In recent customer engagements, this approach has enabled Lam to shorten process development up to 2.5 times.
"Congratulations to Lam on this investment. Micron is proud to work with Lam as we advance memory and storage solutions that power the AI ecosystem," said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president and chief technology and products officer at Micron Technology. "Our longstanding collaboration with Lam continues to drive innovation in leading-edge front-end and advanced packaging technologies, and we look forward to building on this momentum to scale AI across the semiconductor ecosystem."
"Wafer-level semiconductor device processing is the backbone of all semiconductor ecosystems and the enabler of subsequent chip technology advancements," said John West, chief analyst, Semiconductor Equipment at Yole Group. "AI-related investment is lifting demand for deposition and etch intensity. Lam Research's etch, deposition, and advanced packaging wafer fabrication equipment innovations along with new EUV/DUV lithography technologies have helped to enable the production of semiconductor devices with the right combination of power consumption, performance, price, and form factor to unlock the AI revolution. Sustaining this momentum will require the semiconductor ecosystem to innovate faster, compress development cycles, and scale new technologies into manufacturing more quickly."
