Content
NY Creates and Fraunhofer Partner on Next-Generation Memory
A joint development agreement pairs Albany’s 300mm R&D capabilities with Germany’s leading center for ferroelectric memory
The memory chips that store data in everything from phones to AI servers are approaching the limits of current materials. One promising alternative is ferroelectric memory based on hafnium oxide, which is energy efficient, compatible with standard CMOS manufacturing, and scalable to very small nodes. In May 2025, NY Creates and the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (Fraunhofer IPMS) in Dresden, Germany, signed a joint development agreement to advance those devices at the 300mm wafer scale.
The agreement links the strengths of two of the world’s leading nonprofit semiconductor R&D organizations to engineer, develop, and characterize next-generation memory devices, with the goal of accelerating the evaluation and deployment of new materials.
Two centers, one problem
Fraunhofer IPMS, through its Center Nanoelectronic Technologies, maintains a leading international competence center for hafnium oxide ferroelectric memory, a technology with particular promise for neuromorphic computing. NY Creates brings the Albany NanoTech Complex, North America’s largest and most advanced nonprofit semiconductor R&D facility, with the 300mm toolsets and cleanroom capacity needed to take memory concepts from lab scale to manufacturing scale.
“We look forward to this collaboration with Fraunhofer IPMS to further develop next-generation ferroelectric memory devices at the 300mm scale.”
Dave Anderson, President, NY Creates
The Fraunhofer agreement fits a broader memory story in the state. Micron, the largest U.S. memory manufacturer, is building a $100 billion megafab campus in Central New York and is a founding partner in the $10 billion High NA EUV lithography center at the Albany complex. As Micron’s fabs come online, the research done in Albany on next-generation memory materials will have a direct path to production nearby.
The agreement also reflects how NY Creates operates: as a lab-to-fab bridge that connects global research partners with industry, at a scale few other institutions can match. Germany’s Fraunhofer, Japan’s JETRO and SCREEN, and the Netherlands’ ASML have all found reasons to work in Albany. That convergence is the point.