Cambridge startup unveils new tool to accelerate chip manufacturing from weeks to hours
Halfway through her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Teja Potocnik began to regret her focus on nanoelectronics.
On a regular day, she was building transistors for next-generation chips with novel materials, and the process to manufacture them was slow, lengthy and manually intensive.
That’s when she decided to build her own solution. By combining image processing and computer vision, Potocnik developed a new manufacturing approach that significantly sped up her research, allowing her to obtain larger amounts of data.
It was soon clear that the methodology could have transformative applications far beyond her thesis — to accelerate the discovery of new materials that could power the future of computing.
“As chips are becoming smaller and smaller, we’ve reached the limits of what we can do with silicon,” Potocnik says. “A lot of the research on chip miniaturisation focuses on novel semiconducting materials — nanowires, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and graphene — that can be hundreds of times faster than silicon but aren’t commercially available yet because the process to make them is still too time consuming to be scalable.”
Potocnik’s solution, which has evolved into semiconductor software startup Nanomation, incubated at Conception X, automates several steps required to integrate nanomaterials into chips and speeds up the discovery and development of new materials, enabling faster and more precise inspection and analysis of samples.
“Typically, analysing a sample requires multiple stages and types of equipment — optical, electron and atomic force microscopy, and repeated calibrations at each step to identify its properties,” Potocnik says.
This process takes approximately five weeks, but the PhD founder says Nanomation can accelerate it by three orders of magnitude — to a couple of hours.
“Our software offers a nanoscale positioning system that can be used across different techniques and tools, to streamline the process and collect unprecedented amounts of data on the properties of new materials more quickly,” she says.
The startup is now building collaborations with manufacturers of key semiconductor fabrication equipment, including lithography tools, optical inspection systems and microscopy alignment technologies.
Its long-term goal is to collaborate with semiconductor fabrication plants to commercialise new nanomaterial-based devices that are faster, more energy efficient and offer enhanced capabilities — such as chips that can perform calculations at unprecedented speeds, consumer electronics with extended battery life, data centres with reduced energy consumption, and devices equipped with infrared sensing for night vision and other advanced applications.
About Nanomation and Conception X
When Potocnik joined the deeptech venture programme Conception X in 2022, she was just starting to explore opportunities beyond academia. Only a few months later, she made the leap to running her own startup full time.
“I found it really helpful to get encouraged to pursue this while finishing my PhD, without being pressured to drop everything, which would have been quite stressful,” she says.
“I gained essential knowledge about starting a company — covering IP, finance and legal — that you wouldn’t necessarily get during a PhD. I also worked closely with a coach who was a great match for my startup, and after pitching at the Conception X Demo Day, I made my first VC connections, whom I’m still in touch with today.”
Nanomation is currently raising a pre-seed round. Get in touch with Teja Potocnik to learn more.
