Intermolecular, Inc., the trusted partner for materials innovation and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, today announced the relocation of the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub from Menlo Park to Intermolecular’s San Jose facilities, combining Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany’s innovation efforts in the Bay area with Intermolecular’s services for materials and electronics, creating a unique space that empowers collaboration with startups.
The Silicon Valley Innovation Hub was established in 2017 in Menlo Park, CA. As part of the global Innovation Ecosystem of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, it strives to identify and develop viable new businesses and technologies between the company’s existing business sectors or break new ground beyond them.
“The mission of the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub is to identify and explore untapped innovation- and business opportunities for Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. In this context, the intersection of life science and material science is becoming increasingly important and opens new areas of innovation. Having the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub and Intermolecular under one roof now will allow us and our cooperation partners to develop and test new materials for biological applications. We are very excited about these new opportunities,” states Thomas Herget, head of the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub.
Intermolecular has a unique toolset and expertise to quickly test and prove new advanced technologies and materials for semiconductor devices and electronic applications.
Having the Innovation Hub in the same building will further strengthen collaboration of the company’s businesses with startups and innovative companies in and around the Bay Area to rapidly grow their business from concept to high-volume manufacturing. The building boasts 30,000 square feet of cleanroom, chemical labs, offices, a collaboration area and event spaces.
Intermolecular’s customizable services are tailored to meet a startup’s unique needs, whether it is achieving a proof-of-principle, a first prototype, or a small series production. Intermolecular assigns experts in emerging technologies and offers its manufacturing facilities, which can run experiments 24/7to test and validate materials critical to product development. Intermolecular’s flexible methodologies and quality data help accelerate product design innovation, at any phase of a startup’s product development cycle.
“Intermolecular offers a seamless process flow that is specific and confidential to each startup, which is key to speeding time to innovation,” said Casper van Oosten, business field head and managing director for Intermolecular, Inc. “By providing startups the tools and expertise to validate their ideas, we can help them accelerate their path to new investment and speed their product introductions by giving them concrete data needed to move quickly from a research phase to full production. Having the experts from the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub now under one roof, we are looking forward to branch out into new areas and exploring collaboration opportunities that bring benefits to our customers/startups.”
“Semiconductor companies, particularly companies working on current generation and emerging memories, need to do a lot of experimentation to get the best combination of processes and materials,” said Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates. “Companies such as Intermolecular can provide efficient ways to gather and analyze the required data to make the next generations of memory possible.”
