CEO Interview: Mikko Utriainen of Chipmetrics

Tell us about your company?
Chipmetrics is a Finnish company specializing in metrology solutions for high aspect ratio 3D chips, especially 3D NAND and 3D DRAM with an eye on GAAFET and CFET structures. We are a young but mature company founded in 2019 with over 40 customers worldwide, and we’re looking to further scale up our international business efforts in the coming years.

This far, in addition to our home market in northern Europe, we’ve found success in Japan and we’re also represented in other key markets such as South Korea, Taiwan and USA.

What problems are you solving?
We provide test chips that enable companies to develop next-generation 3D semiconductors, speeding up associated R&D and process control workflows with quick access to high-quality data.

With our various test chips, engineers can check the quality of their film deposits with an ellipsometer or other conventional surface analysis tools near-instantaneously, rather than sending them away for analysis which can take weeks. This gives access to high-quality data quickly, which in its turn cuts down on development time of 3D chips.

What application areas are your strongest?
We have a unique position in metrology solutions for film deposition, be it ALD or CVD. Considering that ALD was originally invented in Finland, it feels extra special to be able to offer Finnish solutions as ALD technology is becoming more and more relevant with 3D semiconductors.

What keeps your customers up at night?
Challenges with conformal deposition, gap-fill deposition and selective deposition, the latter especially in DRAM. High-quality films and quality control are also at the forefront of our clients’ minds. As ever, they also wish to speed up their time to market and lower the process temperatures.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
We believe we have a unique niche with our test chips and metrology solutions. That said, we do jack into the ALD landscape with batch systems, where our test structures are needed.

What we do with our PillarHall family of test chips is speed up process control screening without diminishing accuracy. It is, to our knowledge, the only practical way to measure film quality, properties, microstructure, the elemental composition of the sidewall in a high aspect ratio cavity on a wafer level.

What new features/technology are you working on?
This summer, we launched the latest iteration of the PillarHall, LHAR5. It allows for metrology of high-aspect ratio chips with gap heights as low as 100 nanometers. At the same time, we launched the ASD-1 chip, for Area Selective Deposition, in our quest to offer a complete lineup of 3D metrology chips.

We also value collaboration with our clients, meaning we’re busy ideating and iterating with them and coming up with custom concepts and test structure wafers for them.

How do customers normally engage with your company?
We have well defined products for sale. Interested parties can easily approach us with a short RFQ email through our website and we reply fast. Our clients are typically recurring with orders, and we believe they come back in part due to our high service level. Also our product development is based on the repeat order customer feedback and needs. We are also active in digital marketing, trade shows and scientific conferences. Those are important forums for startups in the semiconductor field, and for us especially the AVS and SEMI events have been useful. Lastly, the core Chipmetrics team consists of industry veterans with strong personal networks that we tap into, and on top of this we have local representatives in key markets.

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