ChEmpower raises $18.7M to advance semiconductor chip polishing technology

ChEmpower Corp., a semiconductor materials company providing polish pads and chemical solutions, today announced it has raised $18.7 million in a new early-stage funding for its effort to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and promote sustainability in the chipmaking process.

The Series A round was co-led by M Ventures and Rhapsody Venture Partners.

The company provides materials for chemical mechanical planarization, a process necessary for the manufacture of integrated circuits. CMP is the polishing or flattening of a semiconductor wafer surface to remove excess material so that additional layers can be added.

Conventional CMP uses a chemical and an abrasive slurry to grind away unwanted materials to create an ultra-smooth surface. This is crucial for producing modern integrated circuits with multiple layers on wafers. Imperfections in the flatness can cause misalignment or failures in the final product.

Speaking exclusively with SiliconANGLE, co-founder and Chief Executive Sudhanshu Misra, Ph.D., said the company seeks to revolutionize the CMP process by providing polishing pads and using specialized chemicals instead of abrasive particles.

“When you’re polishing and grinding with abrasive with solids in it, and you have these complex layers of circuitry, you’re going to leave residue behind,” Misra said. “You’re going to scratch the wafers.”

He cited around 5% to 10% yield losses depending on different customers and chip designs. Using a polishing pad and a chemical bath instead greatly reduces the potential for these flaws.

“We totally eliminate these particles,” he said. “We innovated our technology to get a superior and comparable technology that enables planarization without the yield loss, without the cost and with sustainability in mind.”

The increasing demand for high-end artificial intelligence chips, especially those measuring less than 10 nanometers, continues to drive more complex requirements for the production of chips. As these processes continue to shrink, additional polishing steps are needed to enhance performance.

Misra stressed that ChEmpower’s technology will help semiconductor fabrication meet sustainability goals by reducing the amount of water used in the chip production process. He explained that the technology can be used to recover the water used.

“Because you’re circulating, you’re using a lot of water in this process,” Misra said. “Just going solely by how much water is being consumed in a fab, 40% or more comes from the planarization process. It’s around 8 billion gallons on an annual basis globally.”

New and existing investors joining the round included Intel Capital, Pangaea Ventures, Foothill Ventures, In-Q-Tel and TEL Venture Capital.

“At a time when the demands of AI and sustainability are reshaping the semiconductor industry, ChEmpower’s innovative approach offers a compelling solution,” said Scott Shaw, chief of staff at Intel Capital. “Their scalable, high-performance technology is precisely the type of breakthrough needed to meet the evolving needs of the semiconductor market, and we are excited to support their journey to lead the next generation of chip manufacturing.”

Misra said the company will use the new funding to enhance its technology and further research and development of new products. Currently, the company provides an abrasive-free solution for copper semiconductor production. But in the semiconductor technology roadmap, there are polymers and some exotic materials that will someday need to be planarized and surface-finished with materials such as molybdenum and ruthenium.

“All these metals will require different chemistries. They will have to stitch together into a polymer matrix and do it in a very customized fashion,” said Misra. “We are like tailors. We are tailoring with molecules and the chemistries. We stitch them together in such a way that we can control it.”

Image: SiliconANGLE/DALL-E 3

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