This, our 61st patent, is grant­ed in India which is a fast-grow­ing mar­ket with­in the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try. The patent belongs to the Helplay­er fam­i­ly – one of our hard­core tech­nol­o­gy and con­cept fam­i­lies. The Helplay­er tech­nol­o­gy essen­tial­ly is a method to pro­tect the under­lay­ing sub­strate or mate­ri­als from being dam­aged dur­ing the nanos­truc­ture growth process.

India is a fast-grow­ing semi­con­duc­tor mar­ket in the field of con­sumer elec­tron­ics. Fur­ther­more, India is emerg­ing as a new impor­tant semi­con­duc­tor fab source in Asia. Hence it becomes a strate­gic choice to have a core IP foot­print also in India.”, says Dr Shafiq Kabir, Founder and Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer at Smoltek.

Smoltek’s patent port­fo­lio has today devel­oped into sev­er­al patent fam­i­lies, start­ing from fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy that enables con­trolled growth of nanos­truc­tures. Since then, the port­fo­lio has fur­ther expand­ed into the domain of devices/​components based on, or enabled by, nanostructures.

Dur­ing the ini­tial phase of Smoltek’s devel­op­ment of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, the first set of patent fam­i­lies was designed to pro­tect essen­tial indus­try-com­pat­i­ble process­es. One of these ear­ly fam­i­lies is a method patent fam­i­ly named Helplayer.

The Helplay­er patent fam­i­ly offers a method to pro­tect the under­ly­ing sub­strate and mate­ri­als when grow­ing nanos­truc­tured mate­r­i­al on the sur­face. Sub­se­quent­ly, after­wards the helplay­er can be removed from the unwant­ed areas in a con­trolled way with­out dam­ag­ing under­lay­ing mate­ri­als, or cir­cuits (i.e. tran­sis­tors). This method, for exam­ple, pro­vides the pos­si­bil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture small­er and thin­ner high-per­for­mance capac­i­tors not only as dis­crete capac­i­tor com­po­nents but also as inte­grat­ed capac­i­tors at wafer fab pro­duc­tion of for exam­ple micro­proces­sors, smart inter­posers or chiplets.

Smoltek’s patent port­fo­lio now glob­al­ly com­pris­es 61 grant­ed patents. Read more about our IP and patents.

Image: Shafiq Kabir, CIO at Smoltek