Hitachi and IBM announced on March 10 that they have reached a two-year collaboration agreement in a bid to speed up the development of chip-making technologies and lower R&D costs.

Leveraging Hitachi's cutting-edge chip technologies and innovations and IBM's CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) R&D capabilities, both parities agreed to expand their current cooperation to the development of metrology for 32nm and more advanced generation chips, according to EETimes. The project will be conducted at the facilities in Yorktown Heights and Albany, New York, according the same source. Currently, the two companies are working together on developing enterprise servers and other products.

IBM, however, declined to comment whether or not Hitachi will be included into its Common Platform alliance. To date, the alliance members already include AMD, Chartered, Freescale, Infineon, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and STMicroelectronics.