Lace, a Norway-based chipmaking equipment startup backed by Microsoft, has raised $40 million in funding to develop a technology that could bring significant advances in the design and manufacturing of semiconductors, the company announced on Monday.
To produce cutting-edge chips, manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Intel employ a process called lithography, which uses light to design complex circuits. These manufacturers use light-based lithography systems produced by Dutch company ASML, which dominates this market.
The sector has once again attracted strong interest from investors and governments with the emergence of a new wave of startups, some of which intend to compete with ASML.
Lace has developed a new approach. Instead of light, its engineers created a form of lithography that uses a beam of helium atoms. With this, the Norwegian company claims to be able to create chip designs 10 times smaller than currently possible, Chief Executive Bodil Holst told Reuters.
“Our technology is a way to potentially expand the roadmap and be an enabler to do things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” said Holst.
The main advantage of the helium atom beam is that it allows the creation of structures, such as transistors, to an order of magnitude smaller — to an “almost unimaginable” degree, according to John Petersen, scientific director of lithography at Imec, a research and innovation center for the chip sector.
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The beam that Lace will use to make chips is about the width of a single hydrogen atom, or 0.1 nanometers. ASML’s lithography tools use a beam of light about 13.5 nanometers. For comparison, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.
Smaller transistors and other features would give chipmakers the ability to boost the performance of advanced AI processors far beyond current capabilities. Lace’s technology would allow manufacturers to print semiconductor wafers with “atomic resolution,” Holst said.
The company’s financing round was led by Atomico, with additional investments from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, M12, Linse Capital, Sociedad Española de Transformación Tecnológica and Nysnø.
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Lace, which declined to comment on the valuation after the round, has already developed system prototypes and intends to have a test tool in operation in a pilot chip factory, or fabaround 2029. The company presented its findings in an invited paper at a scientific lithography summit in February.
