Tech giant IBM and Japan’s electronics company Tokyo Electron (TEL) have renewed their partnership to advance semiconductor technologies for the next five years.
The collaboration will focus on developing next-generation semiconductor nodes and architectures to support the era of generative AI.
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The alliance builds on their two-decade-long partnership, leveraging IBM’s semiconductor process integration expertise and TEL’s advanced equipment.
IBM Hybrid Cloud vice-president and IBM Semiconductors general manager Mukesh Khare said: “The work IBM and TEL have done together over the last 20 years has helped to push the semiconductor technology innovation to provide many generations of chip performance and energy efficiency to the semiconductor industry.
“We are thrilled to be continuing our work together at this critical time to accelerate chip innovations that can fuel the era of generative AI.”
IBM and TEL earlier achieved breakthroughs like the laser debonding process for 300mm silicon chip wafers used in 3D chip stacking technology.
Their ongoing collaboration aims to explore technology for smaller nodes and chiplet architectures to meet future performance and energy efficiency demands in generative AI.
Both companies are part of the Albany NanoTech Complex, operated by NY CREATES, which is known for semiconductor research.
This facility was selected as America’s first National Semiconductor Technology Center, the NSTC EUV Accelerator.
As part of the renewed agreement, researchers from IBM and TEL will jointly continue to work at this site.
Tokyo Electron Representative director, president & CEO Toshiki Kawai said: “IBM and Tokyo Electron have built a strong relationship of trust and innovation through years of joint development.
“We are excited to continue to build on our long-standing partnership with IBM for another five years. This renewed agreement underscores our mutual commitment to advancing semiconductor technologies, including patterning processes with High NA EUV.
“Our collaboration at the Albany NanoTech Complex has been instrumental in driving innovation and we look forward to continuing this journey together.”
In February 2025, IBM said it plans to acquire DataStax to enhance its watsonx portfolio.
DataStax is known for AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise, offering NoSQL and vector database capabilities based on Apache Cassandra, along with Langflow, an open-source tool for low-code AI application development.
