Intermolecular, a new company located in the heart of Silicon Valley's chip industry (San Jose, Calif.), has launched a technology it says will help semiconductor companies accelerate their research and development of new materials.
Manufacturing breakthroughs in semiconductors are getting more difficult, because of the tiny size of today's chips. Finding new materials has become the hope for many chip companies. Intermolecular, which has been secretive for almost three years, has raised $36 million to develop its platform, which lets chip companies perform many more tests in R&D.
Early investors were CMEA Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, and U.S. Venture Partners and Symyx Technologies joined more recently.
Here's a snippet from trade pub Semiconductor International (sorry, no link):
Today, much of the industry’s R&D is done with process equipment intended for volume wafer processing. By contrast, the Intermolecular system is intended to create “massively parallel” processes on a 300 mm wafer, up to 570 distinct process variations on a single wafer, said Gus Pinto, executive vice president of business development. Intermolecular has worked with “a large logic manufacturer” to synthesize a unique molecule that will be used in copper interconnects at the 32 nm node. “This is a molecule that doesn’t exist anywhere else on Earth today, engineered to have properties of interest to that application,” [chief exec David] Lazovsky said. The Intermolecular approach helped the customer develop a novel integration scheme, including a specific process that allows the integration of the self-assembled monolayer. He called it “one of first implementations of a self-assembled copper monolayer.”
The company says it has more than 700 patents granted or applied for.