KLA Corporation announced the opening of two important facilities in Chennai, India, supporting the company’s investment in innovative research and talent development. KLA’s Artificial Intelligence-Advanced Computing Lab (AI-ACL)—operated in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras—will serve as a center of excellence for AI-focused research and development. In addition, a new office space in Chennai expands KLA’s existing business operations as the company continues to grow and hire from the region.
KLA, a Fortune 500 company with 12,000+ global employees, is a leading supplier of process control and process enabling solutions for the global semiconductor and electronics industry. At KLA India, engineers, data scientists and problem-solvers design solutions that improve the performance of KLA’s process control products and facilitate customer success. KLA’s new state-of-the-art, high-tech research and development center serves as a cultural and collaboration hub for the engineering teams.
“KLA is at the forefront of using AI technology in our process control systems to identify and isolate critical issues in chip manufacturing,” stated Ahmad Khan, president, semiconductor process control at KLA. “To expand the reach of AI in our products and develop the next generation of AI innovations, we created our new AI-ACL research facility. Our researchers and engineers at AI-ACL join the AI experts at our AI Modeling and Center of Excellence in Michigan to form a global team committed to advancing the boundaries of AI, software, image processing and physics modeling.”
Officiating over the opening of both facilities, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Director of IIT Madras said, “KLA and IIT Madras have been collaborating for over 15 years. We look forward to an expanded collaboration with KLA in AI, advanced parallel computing, and quantum computing research for applications in the semiconductor inspection and metrology domain. The IIT Madras Research Park ecosystem is a perfect enabler for such an industry with academic collaboration that is bringing together our resident experts, top student researchers and industry’s best minds. I also congratulate KLA on the grand opening of its new office in RMZ Millenia-II today.”
Beyond expanding business in India, KLA prioritizes making a positive impact on the local community. In May, KLA created a $550,000 India pandemic relief fund to aid healthcare facilities in procuring critically-needed equipment in the fight against Covid-19. The donation also supports a long-term investment to expand ICU capacity in regional hospitals and better address the needs of under-privileged communities.