Nexstrom has raised $12M in seed funding to commercialize the equipment and processes that grow 2D semiconductor materials straight onto chip wafers.
Xora Innovation led the round, with SEEDS and Foothill Ventures joining, which lifts the Singapore company’s total funding to $15M. Nexstrom was incubated by Xora and is developing a way to manufacture transition-metal dichalcogenides, films only a few atomic layers thick that move current more efficiently than silicon pushed to its limits.
North Star, its flagship tool, deposits those films onto 300mm wafers, the standard size in commercial fabs.
Chief scientist Lance Li frames the difficulty as one of scale rather than physics. He previously led post-silicon electronics research at TSMC, and his work on these materials stretches back to 2012. Laboratories, he says, can produce pristine samples, but nobody has industrialized them across a full-size wafer.
Everyone wants past silicon
TSMC, Intel and Belgium’s IMEC are all chasing 2D-material transistors, while equipment makers such as AIXTRON work on neighboring parts of the chain. Nexstrom has no plan to take them on directly; it would rather sell to fabs that prefer licensing a process to building one.
Samples are already with unnamed partners, the company says, though it would not identify them. Growing the material evenly across a whole wafer remains the hurdle standing between the technology and credible mass production.
