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. Mind­bog­gling 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

Recom­men­ded read­ing for you who want to learn more about our ultra-thin CNF-MIN decoup­ling capacitors: