Micron on Thursday announced a plan to establish the Micron Research Lab, which will explore memory, computing, packaging, and semiconductor manufacturing technologies that could be used commercially more than a decade from now. The facility will bring together expertise from Micron itself as well as its customers, government organizations, startups, universities, and partners in a bid to develop pre-competitive IP that will be required years away. The company plans to invest $10 billion over the next 10 years in the initiative.
Traditionally, universities, R&D organizations, and internal R&D units of large companies research new materials, architectures, phenomena, methods, and technologies that are years, if not decades, away from commercial deployment. Then, companies like Micron build new products using that fundamental IP to build actual products. As products and technologies become more complex, the time it takes a pre-competitive IP to become a product stretches, while R&D operations become more costly. This is where joint development operations like Micron's Research Lab come into play, as they bring fundamental research closer to developers of actual products.
