Applied & Advantest EPIC tie‑up

Applied Materials said on April 21 that Advantest will join its EPIC platform in Silicon Valley, tying chipmaking tools more closely to the machines that test finished chips and packages. (advantest.com) The companies said Advantest is the first automated test equipment company to join the Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization platform. Advantest is setting up a new Innovation Center on Applied Materials’ research campus in Silicon Valley, next to Applied’s EPIC Center. (advantest.com) In chipmaking, “front-end” work builds transistors on silicon wafers, while “back-end” work packages those chips and checks whether they actually perform as designed. Applied and Advantest said their joint setup is meant to connect those steps more directly for semiconductors and advanced packaging. (appliedmaterials.com) (advantest.com) That linkage has become more urgent as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing chips use more complex packaging, including 3D structures and high-bandwidth memory stacks. Applied and Advantest both said those designs require tighter coordination between process development, packaging and test. (advantest.com) (appliedmaterials.com) Applied has been building EPIC as a broader collaboration model since announcing the Silicon Valley center in May 2023. The company says the site is a $5 billion project, the largest U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment research and development, and says it is scheduled to open in 2026. (appliedmaterials.com 1) (appliedmaterials.com 2) Applied expanded that push into packaging in November 2024, when it said it would use the EPIC model to speed commercialization of advanced chip packaging technologies and brought together more than two dozen research leaders in Singapore. (appliedmaterials.com) The new Advantest facility is designed as a dedicated lab and research space with equipment for joint development programs, according to the companies. Applied said the goal is to help chipmakers move new designs to market faster by shortening the loop between manufacturing experiments and test results. (markets.businessinsider.com) (appliedmaterials.com) Applied has already used EPIC to line up other partners, including Micron for memory research at the Silicon Valley center and SK hynix for artificial-intelligence memory work, both announced in 2026. Advantest adds the test side of the chip supply chain to a platform Applied has mostly described around process and packaging development. (appliedmaterials.com 1) (appliedmaterials.com 2) The immediate next step is physical co-location: Applied says the EPIC Center opens in 2026, and the companies said Advantest’s Innovation Center will connect into that campus. The bet is that putting manufacturing and test engineers in the same place will cut time between a wafer experiment and a pass-or-fail result. (appliedmaterials.com) (advantest.com)