PragmatIC raises $80m for second plastic chip fab
PragmatIC Semiconductor manufactures circuits on polyimide substrates allowing flexible and low-cost ICs to be embedded in everyday objects. The funding will be used to expand the company’s manufacturing facility at Sedgefield in North-East England and allow it to offer its manufacturing technology as a foundry service.
Investors include Cambridge Innovation Capital, label maker Avery Dennison and processor IP developer ARM. PragmatIC worked with ARM on the first fully plastic version of a Cortex M0+ microcontroller and 6502 processor. The design and production process is much shorter for the plastic devices, says the company, allowing different versions of a chip to be developed in a few weeks rather than six months for a silicon process.
Related articles:
- PragmatIC develops plastic 6502 processor
- PragmatIC releases PDK for new FlexIC Foundry service
- Flexible fab could slash chip shortage
- Why is the chip shortage getting worse?
- ARM shows first plastic M0+ microcontroller
“Our FlexLogIC-002 fab will deliver significantly higher capacity than our first line, whilst still maintaining our signature ultra-low capex, fast production cycle time and minimal carbon footprint,” said Scott White, CEO of PragmatIC Semiconductor. “In addition to supporting our continued commercial ramp, it provides a template for rolling out a distributed global network of FlexLogIC systems, offering a Fab-as-a-Service (FaaS) for dedicated production on major customer sites to enable efficient and secure semiconductor supply chains.”
Erik Langaker, chairman, said: “This capital raise is a fantastic recognition of the achievements of Scott White, Richard Price and their team. The round has been subscribed by a highly qualified select group of industrial and individual investors with significant experience in the semiconductor industry. Their backing will enable the team to more than double in size over the next 12 months and expand capacity to fulfil the rapidly growing demand for electronics in everyday objects.”
“Billions of everyday objects could benefit from being part of the Internet of Things, but to continue to scale sustainably we need to explore new approaches for embedding intelligence into everyday objects,” said Dipesh Patel, ARM chief technology officer.
Other related articles
- UK project to tag plastic waste with RFID
- PragmatIC receives orders for 20 million printed ICs
- £1.3m for RFID tagging of recycling waste
- Flexible RFID drives scalable medical sample shipments
Other articles on eeNews Europe
- 14,336 ARM cores in chiplet-based waferscale AI engine
- AT&S in €500m expansion
- Super-cooled feeds for space antennas
- Sivers Semiconductors in mmWave chip buy
- World’s fastest deep learning inference software for Arm Cortex-M
- Nordic ports TinyML to cellular IoT chip
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
