Nascent Corvallis tech company Inpria announced Thursday that it’s raised $31 million in its third round of funding. This constitutes Oregon’s first big venture capital investment of 2020. Said round brings the total investment in Inpria to around $68 million.
The world’s leading chip manufacturers are among the backers. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Hynix, ALAID, and Applied Ventures have all expressed interest in the firm.
Nano-scale Chips A Tricky Prospect: Modern chip manufacturing hasn’t exactly hit a wall, but the race towards miniaturization has come to a place where current techniques cannot reliably produce the tiny features that atomic-scale microprocessors require. Intel’s latest generation of 10-nanometer chips, for example, which rolled out several years behind schedule, was hampered largely due to reliability issues in accurately printing circuitry so tiny. Inpria’s angle is to help renovate the industry’s approach to manufacture.
Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) The Next Generation: The process of chip lithography is, at heart, a synthesis of photography and etching. If a blank silicon wafer is the photo negative, the camera is the device projecting the image on the wafer. To get better resolution at the nano scale, shorter wavelengths of light are used. EUV lithography is the must-have tool for smaller chip manufacture.
Enter Inpria, a spin-off from OSU’s chemistry department. Their specialty is developing photoresists (the “negatives,” or blank wafers on which circuitry is printed), that are specifically designed for exposure to extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. Inpria’s materials employ molecules that are up to one-fifth the size of the current standard. This will be a significant change in how semiconductors are produced, and will allow for much greater precision at scale.
Committed to Corvallis: Inpria has stated its intention to keep production in Corvallis, and will work with OSU’s Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute as it grows its business.
By Peter Bask
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