sk-hynix
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Avicena Tech
Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.
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.
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%.