Startup Funding: October 2022


Investors poured $3.5 billion into 113 startup companies in October 2022, especially new battery technology, AI hardware, and faster memory access. Battery technology dominated the fundraising in October thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy and four funding rounds that exceeded $200M. The DOE awarded sizeable grants to help 20 companies, including six startups, build out battery material ... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2022


The onshoring and buildout of dozens of fabs, many costing tens of billions of dollars, is beginning to spill over into other areas that are critical for chip manufacturing. Materials, in particular, which often gets little attention outside of chip manufacturing, witnessed a big spike in September 2022. In fact, seven materials companies covered in this report made up more than a third of the ... » read more

Cybord: Electronic Component Traceability


Counterfeit electronics is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. The challenge is finding them, and this is where Israeli startup Cybord is working to gain a foothold. The company has developed an AI-driven solution that checks for counterfeit parts during product assembly. “It's a huge task to check electronic components, said Cybord CEO Zeev Efrat. "It's not capacitors only, or resis... » read more

Startup Funding: August 2022


Investors funneled $1.9 billion into startups last month. The total was down from the previous few months for companies tracked by Semiconductor Engineering, but still a strong showing for the chip industry and related technologies. By market segment, power devices were a bright spot in August's funding, with 12 companies receiving new financing rounds. A manufacturer of multilayer ceramic c... » read more

CogniFiber: Photonic Computing


Computing with light has many advantages. It's fast, cheap, and it doesn't generate much heat. But it's also difficult to make it work, and it has a number of challenges that are specific to photonics. CogniFiber, an Israeli startup, says it has solved many of these issues. The company uses photonics over fiber, and it has introduced a glass-based chip. “We use light as a data conveyor ... » read more

Startup Funding: July 2022


Quantum computing may seem like a futuristic technology, but computation based on superposition and entanglement is here and investors are eager to get behind it. Two of July's rounds that passed the $100 million mark were for superconducting quantum processor companies, one of which is also developing EDA software to assist in designing quantum circuits. And it's not just mega-rounds. Two quan... » read more

Startup Funding: June 2022


Big money went to manufacturing in June, with a massive round for a Chinese analog foundry’s expansion to 55 – 40nm nodes. A fab management software startup also drew sizeable investment, as did a supplier of semiconductor-grade silicon components. Investors didn’t forget chip design, with three EDA companies receiving new funding, one of which drew over $100 million. Plus, numerous te... » read more

Startup Funding: May 2022


May was another strong month for China as it continues its push to build a native semiconductor ecosystem. Over half the month's total funding went to startups in the country. Over half the companies funded were from China as well, including two FPGA companies, three making CPUs, a GPU startup, and numerous networking and wireless chip companies. Two of those, in FPGAs and CPUs, raised rounds s... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2022


Silicon photonics holds the potential to vastly increase bandwidth in chips and systems while reducing power use — and investors are taking note. In April, one of the largest funding rounds went to a startup developing chip-to-chip optical I/O. But that wasn't all. Photonics funding showed up in AI with a photonic Tensor core, in room-temperature quantum computing, and, of course, in lidar an... » read more

Expedera: Custom Deep Learning Accelerators Through Soft-IP


Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have caused a massive increase in data generation — and along with it, a need to process data faster and more efficiently. Dubbed a “tsunami of data,” data centers are expected to consume about one-fifth of worldwide energy before 2030. This data explosion is driving a wave of startups looking to gain a foothold in custom accele... » read more

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