chip-manufacturing
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Silvaco makes the expensive mistakes before the wafer does
A chip factory is a costly place to ask “what if?” Silvaco gives engineers a virtual rehearsal, then connects the physics to circuits, reusable chip designs and AI-trained digital twins.
The $1.5 Billion Chip Company Hiding in Your Car, Charger and Cloud
Diodes Incorporated built a sprawling semiconductor business by collecting the tiny parts engineers cannot afford to get wrong. Its hybrid factory model creates leverage in a boom, pain in a slowdown - and a useful playbook for operators who know when breadth beats glamour.
The Chip Giant That Quit the Nanometer Race - and Found Its Edge
GlobalFoundries walked away from the industry’s most expensive contest. Now its specialty chips sit inside phones, cars, factories and the optical plumbing of AI - a bet that useful can matter more than smallest.
SEMI
For 55 years SEMI has been the connective tissue of the chip industry - the neutral ground where rival equipment makers, materials suppliers and fabs agree on the rules, sizes and safety norms that let a wafer built in one country be tested in another.
Intel
The company that built the microprocessor is trying to build something harder: a second act. Inside Intel's bet-the-house pivot from selling chips to making everyone else's.
Applied Materials
The company behind the machines that build almost every chip you own - and the atomic-scale materials engineering that keeps Moore's Law alive.
Aerogen Systems
Aerogen Systems is an Ann Arbor deep-tech startup building point-of-use contamination control for semiconductor fabs. Its modules sit inside wafer storage and process tools, continuously capturing and chemically destroying airborne acids and organic contaminants before they reach the wafer - clawing back yield lost to queue-time contamination that conventional cleanroom AMC systems miss. The company spun out of University of Michigan aerospace research and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
SixSense
SixSense is a Singapore-based deep tech company building an AI platform that helps semiconductor manufacturers spot, classify and predict chip defects in real time. Founded in 2018 by Akanksha Jagwani and Avni Agarwal, its no-code software lets process engineers train and deploy computer-vision models on their own fab data in under two days - automating visual inspection, lot disposition and root-cause analysis. Used by chipmakers including GlobalFoundries and JCET, the platform has analyzed more than 100 million chips and raised roughly $12M to date, including an $8.5M Series A in 2025.
Crystal Sonic
Crystal Sonic is a Phoenix, Arizona deep-tech startup that uses sound to cut semiconductor costs. Its patented Sonic Lift-off (SLO) technology acts as an 'acoustic scalpel,' peeling thin device layers off expensive wafers so the underlying substrate can be reused instead of ground into dust. Legacy manufacturing wastes 90% or more of substrate material, and substrates can account for up to half of a device's cost - Crystal Sonic wants to reclaim that. Spun out of an Arizona State University lab in 2018, the company has won backing from NASA, the Department of Energy, the NSF, and Lam Capital.
Arno Merkle
Arno Merkle is the co-founder and CEO of Crystal Sonic, a Phoenix deep tech startup whose patented Sonic Lift-Off technology uses sound waves as an 'acoustic scalpel' to split thin device layers off semiconductor wafers so the costly substrate can be reused. A materials scientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern and more than 75 technical papers to his name, Merkle spent two decades building and exiting X-ray and electron microscopy companies (Xradia, acquired by Carl Zeiss in 2013; XRE, acquired by Tescan in 2018) before turning his attention to one of chipmaking's quietest scandals: that conventional wafering throws away 90% or more of pristine, expensive crystal. With Crystal Sonic he is trying to make next-generation chips cheaper and far less wasteful, one sound wave at a time.
EUV Tech
EUV Tech builds the at-wavelength metrology tools that let the world's chipmakers see what their extreme ultraviolet lithography lines are actually doing. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Martinez, California, the company supplies reflectometers, pellicle measurement systems, phase-imaging tools and SuMMIT software to every major semiconductor foundry running EUV. In 2023 it raised a Series A led by Intel Capital.