Merck
Canvas Category OEM : Pharmaceutical
We aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company in the world. For over 130 years, Merck (known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada) has been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases in pursuit of our mission to save and improve lives. We demonstrate our commitment to patients and population health by increasing access to health care through far-reaching policies, programs and partnerships. Today, we continue to be at the forefront of research to prevent and treat diseases that threaten people and animals – including cancer, infectious diseases, such as HIV and Ebola, and emerging animal diseases.
Assembly Line
Chemicals and materials to play key role in chips as 2-nm milestone nears
James O’Neill, chief technology officer of American chip material maker Entegris, said it is no longer the chipmaking machines, but advanced materials and cleaning solutions that are taking center stage in making advanced production processes possible. “Thirty years ago, it was all about lithography [equipment] to make [transistors on chips] smaller and improve device performance,” O’Neill said. Lithography refers to the key chipmaking process in which integrated circuits are printed onto a chip. How finely a machine can print these circuits generally defines how advanced the chips are.
Kai Beckmann, CEO of Merck’s electronics business, echoed that sentiment. “We are moving from the past two decades where [chipmaking] tools are most important to advance technologies to the next decade, what our customers call the age of materials,” Beckmann said. “The tools are still important, but now materials make all the difference.”
The jump to 2-nm production for logic chips, for example, required a completely new chip architecture. In this new configuration, referred to as gate-all-around (GAA), transistors are stacked in a more complex, three-dimensional way than in earlier, planar configurations. Developing the materials for new transistor configurations like gate-all-around requires innovative materials “that will coat the top, the bottom and the sides equally,” O’Neill said, adding that the industry is engineering ways to do this “at atomic scale dimensions.”
Merck’s Beckmann gave another example of the industry’s material evolution: Copper is widely used as a conductive layer in current chipmaking processes, but to make ever smaller and more advanced chips, the industry is exploring new materials such as molybdenum.
🧀 Next Time You Buy Parmesan, Watch Out for the Microchip
Italian producers of parmesan cheese have been fighting against imitations for years. Now, makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano, as the original parmesan cheese is officially called, are slapping the microchips on their 90-pound cheese wheels as part of an endless cat-and-mouse game between makers of authentic and fake products.
The new silicon chips, made by Chicago-based p-Chip, use blockchain technology to authenticate data that can trace the cheese as far back as the producer of the milk used. The chips have been in advanced testing on more than 100,000 Parmigiano wheels for more than a year. The consortium of producers wants to be sure the chips can stand up to Parmigiano’s aging requirement, which is a minimum of one year and can exceed three years for some varieties.
Drugmaker Merck KGaA will soon begin using the chips, which are also being tested in the automotive industry to guarantee the authenticity of car parts. The chips could eventually be used on livestock, crops or medicine stored in liquid nitrogen.
“We don’t want to be known as the company accused of tracking people,” said Eibon. “I ate one of the chips and nobody is tracking me, except my wife, and she uses a different method.”
🧫 Ginkgo Bioworks Announces Collaboration with Merck to Improve Biologic Manufacturing
Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, today announced a new collaboration with Merck, known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, focused on improving biologic manufacturing.
Ginkgo will apply its expertise and capabilities in cell engineering, ultra high-throughput multiplexed screening, protein characterization and process optimization to improve production efficiency and increase yields. Under the terms of the collaboration, Ginkgo is eligible to receive, in aggregate, up to $490 million in upfront research fees, research milestone fees, option license payments and commercial milestone payments.