GoKawiilThe race to produce more chips is on, and Europe is in. ASML, the Dutch company that has a near-monopoly on manufacturing the machines used for chipmaking, may soon no longer be an isolated success story.
Like its U.S. counterpart, the European Chips Act aims to foster the semiconductor industry — in part thanks to state subsidies. One of the beneficiaries is QuantumDiamonds, a German startup that applies a novel approach to inspecting chips.
With the approval of the European Commission, it has been granted €76 million in non-dilutive funding provided by Germany’s federal economy ministry and the state of Bavaria. The startup will use it to set up a new facility for the production of semiconductor testing equipment in Munich as part of a $178 million investment plan it had already announced.
A spinout from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), QuantumDiamonds has also raised a €15 million equity round led by VC firm World Fund, TechCrunch learned exclusively. The company declined to disclose its valuation but said its round was also backed by Bayern Kapital and existing investors including Creator Fund, Earlybird, First Momentum, IQ Capital, Onsight Ventures and UnternehmerTUM.
CEO Kevin Berghoff told TechCrunch that raising the round was a fairly quick process, as QuantumDiamonds was able to demonstrate customer pull. “We work with almost everyone in the chip ecosystem,” he said. With huge demand for all kinds of chips, there’s just as much demand for solutions to speed up the manufacturing process and improve the output.
By compressing a defect detection process that usually takes weeks into a two-minute inspection that doesn’t stop production lines, QuantumDiamonds claims that it can help the likes of Taiwan-based Foundries and Korea’s Memory Makers save hundreds of millions of dollars.
This means that its hardware is typically paid back entirely within a couple of months, Berghoff said. It also leaves room to cover the subscription fee that the startup charges for on-site support and for its software, which interprets the data and usually gives clients a strong indication of what they should address in their manufacturing process.
Behind the scenes, this happens to be one of the first actual use cases of quantum technology — unlike chips, quantum sensing is already operational in its ability to generate magnetic fields that detect defects with high precision, and that’s all customers care about. “They couldn’t care less about it being quantum,” Berghoff said with a laugh.
Presumably, neither do they care about the diamonds — but in case you are wondering, these are synthetic. What QuantumDiamonds does is leverage their tiniest properties to observe how electricity is flowing through chips. Compared to current inspections, which look at the top layer of a chip with a microscope of sorts, this has the advantage of detecting defects through all layers, without destroying the chip in the process.
This capability could be particularly relevant as chips are increasingly multi-layered. Startups such as Semron have been developing 3D chips, and the industry seems to agree this is the way to go for AI data centers, Berghoff said. “The thing is that the transistors cannot get smaller, so in order to get the same power and the same compute, you start to add more and more layers.”
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