A multi-campus virtual corporate laboratory

The US Semiconductor Industries Association, Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Institute and Department of Defense have jointly established a pioneering new long range research effort identified as the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP). In late 1998 the Interconnect Focus Center (IFC) was established at MIT, Stanford University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, State University of New York at Albany, Cornell University and Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) with GIT serving as the prime contracting university. The overarching goal of the IFC is to discover and invent new solutions that will enable the US semiconductor industry to transcend known limits on interconnections (between billions of transistors in a single silicon microchip) that would otherwise decelerate or halt the historical rate of progress of semiconductor technology.