Substrate was founded in 2022 by two British brothers James and Oliver Proud.
As well as from Thiel’s Founders Fund, investment is reported to have come from General Catalyst, Valor Equity Partners and In-Q-Tel which funds technology development for U.S. defence and intelligence agencies.
Substrate’s approach involves using a proprietary particle accelerator as a light source for an X-Ray lithography tool. The company claims it can make a wafer an order of magnitude cheaper than ASML’s EUV approach.
‘The team at Substrate has designed a new type of vertically integrated foundry that harnesses particle accelerators to produce the world’s brightest beams, enabling a new method of advanced X-ray lithography,’ says Substrate’s website , ‘our accelerators create and power beams that generate light billions of times brighter than the sun, directly into our lithography tools, each using a completely new optical and high-speed mechanical system to produce the smallest of features needed for advanced semiconductor chips.’
‘Our light source begins with radio-frequency cavities accelerating pulses of electrons using powerful electric fields,’ adds the Substrate site, ‘the electrons ride each successive wave, gaining energy and increasing their velocity to near the speed of light. To produce light, these charged, highly energetic electrons traverse a gauntlet of strong alternating magnetic fields, which force them to release their energy as bursts of brilliant, intense light. These bright pulses of light are transported and shaped by a succession of perfectly polished optics all the way to the silicon wafer.’
Substrate has demonstrated the equipment at US National Laboratories and it can, says James Proud, perform lithography down to the same resolution as an ASML high-NA EUV machine – i.e at the current 2nm leading-edge process.
The company’s staff is said to include technologists from US National Laboratories, TSMC, Applied Materials, AMD, Google and Qualcomm.
.James Proud is a ‘Thiel Fellow’ one of those who took up Thiel’s offer of $100k to people who chose to go into starting up companies instead of going to university.
Back in the 80s the Russians built a couple of synchrotrons in Zelenograd for X-Ray lithography in the belief the chip industry had no other way to go to shrink feature sizes. It did as it turned out – immersion.
