CMOS 2.0

IMEC is in Leuven in Belgium, and has been for more than twenty years. It has always been the joint European universities semi-conductor fab, and if they have extended the consortium it's not big news.

I heard Donald Knuth give a talk there about twenty years ago. Cambridge Instruments sold them and electron beam microfabricator and a mask inspection tool early on, and their inputs definitely got the mask inspection tool improved.

They do a lot of frontend stuff too. It's too much hassle to have a local team learn the tools for modern process nodes, especially if you don't put out a regular pipeline of chips. You can just ship your design (Verilog or whatever) to IMEC and they'll do the backend implementation.

They're pretty good at keeping on top of the modern process stuff like multi chip stacking, silicon photonics and the like. They also do multi-project wafers where it's feasible to share a wafer between different customers and so reduce per-project cost for small volumes of chips.

Theo