Semiconductor industry

We enable the semi­con­duc­tors indus­try to con­tin­ue to devel­op ever­more effi­cient electronics.

Smoltek enables the pro­duc­tion of small­er and bet­ter micro­elec­tron­ic com­po­nents through solu­tions for smarter inte­gra­tion. The company’s dis­rup­tive tech­nol­o­gy offers a broad field of pro­duc­tion process­es for the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, among those CMOS-com­pli­ant devices, to meet today’s and tomorrow’s mate­ri­als engi­neer­ing challenges.

One exam­ple of how and where Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy can be imple­ment­ed is in minia­tur­ized capac­i­tors for inte­gra­tion into semi­con­duc­tor circuits—a crit­i­cal appli­ca­tion in the advanced pack­ag­ing of high-per­for­mance processors.

The semiconductor market

The semi­con­duc­tor mar­ket is large, very large. Pure gigan­tic. There are semi­con­duc­tors today in almost every product—which is why we, over the years, have had close dia­logues with sev­er­al large cus­tomers and part­ners, from both a tech­ni­cal and busi­ness per­spec­tive, to iden­ti­fy which part of the semi­con­duc­tor mar­ket we should address with our tech­nol­o­gy. The con­clu­sion is that we will first and fore­most focus on dis­crete super-thin capac­i­tors for mobile appli­ca­tions where the capac­i­tor man­u­fac­tur­ers are our customers.

This is a huge mul­ti-bil­lion market—where the major play­ers today are on the Unit­ed States’ west coast and South­east Asia.

The glob­al semi­con­duc­tor mar­ket is esti­mat­ed to grow at 6% CAGR by $ 84.41 bil­lion dur­ing the fore­cast peri­od 2021–2025.

Mar­ket­watch, July 1, 2021

Semiconductor evolution—and the problem we solve

As the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try has been able to con­tin­ue minia­tur­iz­ing the tran­sis­tors in proces­sor chips, the chip’s per­for­mance increas­es, which gives us faster and increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful com­put­ers, tablets, mobile phones, etc. A con­se­quence of this devel­op­ment is that the elec­tri­cal volt­age in the chip must be reduced, which entails an increased need for so-called decou­pling capac­i­tors near the chip. These capac­i­tors need to be extreme­ly thin to place these close enough to the active proces­sor. Smoltek’s car­bon nanofiber-based (CNF-MIM) capac­i­tors can solve this par­tic­u­lar problem.

A smart­phone con­sists of many com­po­nents. Well, very many. For all these parts to work togeth­er, the entire sys­tem, in each mobile, needs the sup­port of about a thou­sand capac­i­tors. Our focus is to sup­port a sub­set of these con­nect­ed to the heart in the mobile device, name­ly the appli­ca­tion proces­sor, a niche that, in prin­ci­ple, all major play­ers are inter­est­ed in. And con­sid­er­ing that about 1.5 bil­lion appli­ca­tion proces­sors are pro­duced annu­al­ly, the num­ber of capac­i­tors that need to be pro­duced will be quite large.

The market for our capacitors

Approx­i­mate­ly 1.5 bil­lion appli­ca­tion proces­sor chips are pro­duced annu­al­ly (increas­ing 3.6 per­cent per year). The esti­mat­ed mar­ket val­ue of the appli­ca­tion proces­sor chip 2021 is approx­i­mate­ly USD 30 bil­lion (an increase of 7.2 per­cent per year).

From the avail­able reports and after dia­logues with our part­ners, we assess that the mar­ket vol­ume for dis­crete, so-called decou­pling capac­i­tors will be an annu­al vol­ume of 7.5–15 bil­lion capac­i­tors per year for this purpose.

We, togeth­er with our part­ners, will ini­tial­ly focus on this mar­ket. Our com­mon goal is to access a sig­nif­i­cant part of this mar­ket by offer­ing a unique solu­tion in terms of both size and performance.

Learn more

Read more about our Ultra-thin CNF-MIM decou­pling capac­i­tors.

Don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact us with your questions.