Entegris Inc., a materials and solutions provider to the microelectronics industries, inaugurated its new i2M Center for Advanced Materials Science in Bedford, Massachusetts. The facility is the company’s flagship innovation center for developing break-through filtration and specialty coatings technologies, which are used to maximize production yields in the world’s most demanding and challenging microelectronics manufacturing environments.

Representing an investment of more than $55 million, the company said its i2M Center is one of the world’s leading R&D and manufacturing centers for filtration media, metal membranes, electrostatic clamps and proprietary advanced, low-temperature coatings. Approximately 100 professionals will work at i2M Center, many of whom hold doctorates and advanced degrees in material/separation science and chemical engineering.

Entegris estimates that its technology solutions enable the production of most of the world’s semiconductor devices and electronics, which are the fundamental building blocks of high-tech products such as computers, smartphones, TVs and cars. Entegris’ technologies achieve the nano-level purity required in advanced manufacturing environments by controlling particles and other contaminants that are so small they are measured in widths of atoms.

Bertrand Loy, President/CEO of Entegris, said: “i2M stands for ‘ideas to market’ and we intend for this facility to be our flagship innovation center for solving very difficult materials science challenges. Our customers run extremely complex manufacturing processes and the i2M Center reflects our commitment to developing truly innovative solutions to support their process advancements. As a global company serving global customers, we evaluated a number of locations for this new building. We chose Massachusetts because it is at the epicenter of some of the best engineering talent in the world.”