Paul Francis K’s Post

Innovation made in Europe: Lace Lithography is working to develop a new manufacturing process for chips that would enable etching of features an order of magnitude smaller than what ASML can achieve today. The potential has understandably attracted investors attention with a $40 million series A funding round.

Chip lithography start-up Lace raises $40m for tech development The funds could enable significant advances in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Lace Lithography, a Microsoft-backed Norwegian chipmaking equipment start-up, has announced the raising of $40m to be used in the advancement of its unique semiconductor technologies. The Series A funding round was led by Atomico with additional investments from Microsoft’s venture arm M12, Linse Capital, the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation and Nysnø....

Microsoft-supported startup secures $40 million for cutting-edge chip manufacturing technology #business #technology #rswebsols https://ift.tt/yZgOv08 Microsoft-backed Lace has secured $40 million in Series A funding to push the boundaries of semiconductor manufacturing. The Norway-based startup, supported by Microsoft through M12, is developing an atom-beam lithography approach that uses helium atoms to pattern circuits at unprecedented scales—significantly smaller than today’s light-based lithography techniques. Lace’s technology aims to enable wafer printing at near-atomic resolution, with pilot testing expected around 2029. Led by Atomico and joined by Linse Capital and other investors, this round signals a bold step toward next-generation chip design and AI hardware performance. Read more: https://ift.tt/yZgOv08

A Norwegian startup has successfully raised $40 million to develop Helium Atom Beam Lithography, a revolutionary technique that uses neutral helium atoms instead of light to "print" circuits, potentially allowing for resolutions far beyond the limits of current EUV systems. Because helium atoms have a much shorter de Broglie wavelength than light, this "He-Beam" tech could be the key to mass-producing sub-1nm chips by 2030 without the massive energy costs of traditional lithography. #Lithography #HeliumBeam #Innovation #Chips #ChipManufacturing #Semiconductors #FutureTech #Sub1nm #TechNews #CleanTech #SemiconductorIndustry #TechnologyNews https://lnkd.in/dqZSr-7J

Lithography the process of putting an image onto the surface of the silicon. Pretty much like the way a silkscreen puts  “Team Building Exercise 1999” on a T-shirt. Except that this image has to be the highest resolution, with the smallest microscopic features, of anything humans produce. “Moore’s Law” usually refers to increasing transistor density. Basically, how can we make transistors half as big as they were 18 months ago? Every time we figure that out, computers get twice as powerful. The state of the art uses Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light to do the lithography. The machine that can do this cost $50 billion to develop. It has 500,000 parts. Only the Large Hadron Collider is more complicated. To buy one costs $250 million and you’ll be stuck on a waiting list that is $40 billion long. The machine comes from ASML in the Netherlands and they don’t have a single competitor, in the entire world. That machine shoots a tiny ball of molten tin into a vacuum and blasts it with two lasers. This produces a flash of 13.5 nanometer ultraviolet light that gets aimed at the surface of a silicon wafer. ASML advanced from 193nm to 13.5nm light to make this possible, but there’s a problem. The diffraction limit of 13.5 nanometer light was set by either God or Issac Newton and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t print features smaller than that and there’s no practical way to do lithography with a shorter wavelength. When people say that Moore’s Law is over, this is why. The semiconductor industry knows this, so they’ve tried to solve the problem by handing it over to the marketing department where the laws of physics don’t apply. You’ve seen them progress from 45nm to 30nm to 20nm over the last decade, then all of the sudden, 12nm, 7nm, 5nm & soon 3nm chips are coming. This is all just marketing bullshit. This measurement in chips used to be half the distance between the centers of two features. Once marketing took over, they started measuring half the distance between the edges of two features. Instant improvement! Then they started measuring other random stuff. Other kinds of improvements in chip design helped to gloss over the fact that we are no longer able to shrink the size of transistors. Today, there are extraordinary geopolitical machinations to control chip production. The U.S. has tariffs and export controls akin to those for fighter jets and ICBMs. Access to chip production is as critical to superpowers as oil. Lace Lithography had been in stealth since we invested in them a few years ago. They’ve invented the technology that can go beyond Extreme UV and put Moore’s Law back on track. By using helium atoms instead of light, they can make transistors 10x smaller than the physical limit of ultraviolet light can. https://lnkd.in/dq8ruxHV

Is Helium based litho an alternative to EUV? Norway’s Lace Lithography lands €34.5 million to extend Moore’s Law by replacing light with atoms Instead of photons, the company uses a beam of helium atoms to pattern features on silicon. Atoms do not have a diffraction limit like photons, enabling atom-beam lithography to reach resolutions 10 times smaller than current top systems, while using less cost, energy, and complexity. The system integrates smoothly into existing foundry workflows with minimal infrastructure modifications. #semiconductor #semiconductorindustry #tsmc #intel #samsung #imec #globalfoundries #smic #umc #innovation #ai #computerchips #machinelearning #broadcomm #transistor #cowos #skhynix #microntechnology #kioxia #nanya #toshiba #ymtc #yangtze #scaling #moore #manufacturing #production #fabrication #apple #nvidia #arm #amd #qualcomm #ibm #huawei #chip #chipdesign #chipmaker #memory #logic #cpu #processor #FEOL #BEOL #interconnects #dram #nand #3Dnand #nandflash #storage #asml #euv #lithography #zeiss #optics #reticle #photomask #anamorphic #metalorganic #photoresist #laser #trumpf #rapidus #esmc #ksmc #Korea #Japan #europe

Chip lithography start-up Lace raises $40m to further develop tech The funds could enable significant advances in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Lace Lithography, a Microsoft-backed Norwegian chipmaking equipment start-up, has announced the raising of $40m to be used in the advancement of its unique semiconductor technologies. The Series A funding round was led by Atomico with additional investments from Microsoft’s venture arm M12, Linse Capital, the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation and Nysnø....

Lace Lithography, a Microsoft-backed Norwegian chipmaking equipment start-up, has announced the raising of $40m to be used in the advancement of its unique semiconductor technologies. #SiliconRepublic #LaceLithography #Funding #Investment #Chips #Semiconductors #Norway

A great example on developments dominated in the beginning by reactions of “unlikely or impossible” but which in time with innovations and engineering stamina slowly turn into “logical” developments.

The Chip Insider® Are there no more wavelengths?   Summary: SPIE Advanced Lithography & Patterning Conference: After 50 years of breakthroughs … a dark question emerged: Was EUV the last wavelength? This is a very critical question, because if true, it would affect every corner of the industry because it would effectively mean the end of Moore’s Law. It’s hidden right there in Gordon Moore’s 1965 Electronics Magazine article… Over the last 50 years, the progress of scaling … and thus the industry … has been critically dependent on these two factors, which have to a large degree been moved forward by this very conference... Why would EUV be the last wavelength? There are two reasons: Economic and Technical... Cost of B-EUV tool development … Don’t laugh … You just need a different frame of mind to understand this. B-EUV Technology Barriers: There are significant challenges with wavelengths shorter than EUV’s 13.5 nm... This 50th Anniversary ALP conference proved that technologists rarely look back. Sometimes they look sideways. But most of the time they are laser focused on what’s ahead. The 50th Anniversary ALP conference proved to be a springboard for what’s ahead. Before it, I would say B-EUV was seen almost as a joke. I was certainly a sceptic. Now I’m not so sure. As I wrote in December, ‘Moore’s Law is dead. Long live Moore’s Law.’   IBM to the rescue: Morris Chang once chided the top R&D executives at TSMC: “If IBM can do it, you know it can be done.” Alan Gabor’s Lithography Roadmap went all the way to 1A and 2040, showing the technologies needed to pave the way. This included…  Vivek Bakshi’s presentation on the Blue-X consortium and its TWG … (Technical Working Group) was another eye-opener about how the lithography community is coming together to push scaling ahead… Then there was Lace Lithography’s time machine that catapulted you from Hank Smith’s MIT Lincoln Labs in the 90s to today (13982-76). Lace is out of Norway. The presenter, Bodil Holst is CEO and co-founder. She proposed using matter waves … helium atoms … The advantage is … The disadvantage is there’s so much missing infrastructure. This was true of all the B-EUV work presented. It reminded me of the old NGL days filled with many dreams of which only one, EUV, would win and the winner, ASML, wasn’t even there. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the EUV party, which is a long-forgotten truth. They never stole it as some have claimed. No one else wanted it after the few that did died in the funding desert… Lithography is a system of tools, processes, materials, and flows that, when ignored, leave their protagonists without food or water in a death valley.         “I've always been more interested in the future than in the past”                                           — Grace Hopper For subscribers to The Chip Insider®, the full write-up can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gdyaVC_u March 13, 2026 issue Copyright © 2026 TechInsights Inc. All rights reserved