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The Machines That Teach AI Chips to Behave
Onto Innovation does not design the AI chip. It builds the eyes, rulers and feedback loops that help factories make those chips without wasting a fortune.
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.
Emerson
Emerson spent a century making the machinery of modern life. Now it is assembling something harder to see: the digital nervous system for factories, power grids and process plants.
Honeywell Technologies
After spinning off aerospace and advanced materials, Honeywell is smaller, sharper and focused on one difficult job: teaching the physical world to run with less waste, fewer surprises and more autonomy.
PDF Solutions
PDF Solutions is a Santa Clara semiconductor analytics company that turns the firehose of chip-manufacturing and test data into decisions. Its Exensio platform connects fabs, foundries, OSATs and fabless designers, normalizing data across silos so customers can ramp yield faster, catch defects earlier and run AI/ML models on the factory floor. Founded in 1991 and public since 2001 (Nasdaq: PDFS), it serves 130+ semiconductor companies including TSMC, Intel, Qualcomm, Analog Devices and DENSO.
Relimetrics, Inc.
Relimetrics is an AI software company building ReliVision, a no-code visual inspection platform that lets manufacturers digitize quality assurance on the factory floor. Hardware-agnostic and self-installable, it puts model training, retraining and defect detection in the hands of plant engineers instead of data scientists - and its accuracy is unusual enough that reinsurer Munich Re will underwrite it. Founded in 2015 with offices in Silicon Valley and Berlin, the company counts HPE, Lockheed Martin, Foxconn and Siemens Gamesa among its users.
Gauss Labs
Gauss Labs is a Palo Alto-based industrial AI company building software that reads the firehose of data coming off semiconductor fabs and predicts what's about to go wrong. Spun out with $55M in seed capital from SK hynix in 2020, its Panoptes Virtual Metrology and Image Metrology products are deployed inside SK hynix's high-volume memory fabs, where they have measured tens of millions of wafers and cut process variability by double digits.
John Kibarian
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Mike Young-Han Kim
Mike Young-Han Kim is the founding CEO of Gauss Labs, a Palo Alto-based industrial AI startup revolutionizing semiconductor manufacturing. An 11th-generation academic descendant of Carl Friedrich Gauss, he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford along with dual master's degrees in EE and Statistics. Before founding Gauss Labs in 2020, he was a tenured IEEE Fellow professor at UC San Diego and the inaugural recipient of the James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award. Backed by $55M from SK hynix, his company's Panoptes VM platform now inspects over 50 million wafers at SK hynix facilities - at one wafer per second - reducing process variability by 29%.