Qnity and Silicon Catalyst Light a Path to Success at the Chiplet Summit

The Chiplet Summit recently concluded. Multi-die heterogeneous design is a hot topic these days and chiplets are a key enabler for this trend. The conference was noticeably larger this year. There were many presentations and exhibits that focused on areas such as how to design chiplets, what standards are important, how to integrate chiplets and what applications show the most promise. All important, exciting and useful topics. There was one session hosted by Silicon Catalyst that stood out for me as different.

Silicon Catalyst is a different kind of organization. One that doesn’t make chips (or chiplets), develop standards or build software design tools. Instead, it has developed a unique, worldwide incubator to bring semiconductor startups from PowerPoint to product. The organization did showcase a number of promising new companies at the show. More on that later. What I want to focus on first is Qnity, a strategic partner of Silicon Catalyst that has substantial size with more than 10,000 employees serving customers in more than 80 countries. This organization is also the last pure-play electronics supplier in the U.S.

The breadth and depth of Qnity create a powerful force for the semiconductor supply chain. Let’s examine how Qnity and Silicon Catalyst light a path to success at the Chiplet Summit

The Silicon Catalyst Footprint

You can learn a lot about Silicon Catalyst and what the organization does on SemiWiki here. Nick Kepler, COO of Silicon Catalyst gave an excellent keynote at the Chiplet Summit that provided some good context as to what the organization does for chiplets and why it’s unique.  Nick explained that Silicon Catalyst is the only accelerator focused on the global semiconductor industry including chips, chiplets, materials, IP and silicon fabrication. Applications include photonics, MEMS, sensors, life science and quantum.

He went on to describe the extensive, worldwide ecosystem that the organization has built. Many organizations have a logo slide. The one from Silicon Catalyst is quite impressive. It is included below.

Qnity and its Unique Impact on the Semiconductor Supply Chain

Chris Gilmore, Advanced Packaging Technology Strategy Leader for Qnity, presented at the Silicon Catalyst session. (The company name is pronounced “Quenity”.) The company was formed when DuPont spun out its electronics business last year, creating a publicly traded (NYSE: “Q”), worldwide force in advanced electronics materials and solutions empowering AI, high performance computing, and advanced connectivity.

Qnity has 39 manufacturing sites and 17 R&D facilities around the world. The majority of its portfolio is tied directly to semiconductors, giving the company a total addressable market exceeding $30 billion. Qnity gains more than 40% of its revenue in interconnect technologies, including metallization chemistry and laminates, alongside thermal materials through subsidiary Laird Performance Materials.  This vast size and technology base is what unlocks the opportunity for a substantial impact on the chiplet market. More on that in a moment.

With a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry and well over a decade of experience in advanced packaging and materials research at Dow Chemical and DuPont, Chris brought substantial knowledge of the current semiconductor supply chain challenges.

He explained that Qnity has two primary areas of focus. In semiconductor technologies, it provides consumable materials and solutions for semiconductor chip fabrication, fab equipment, and advanced display panels. In interconnect solutions, it provides advanced materials, systems and engineering solutions for signal integrity, power management and thermal management to address interconnect challenges. This totals about a $4.75B business for the company. The figure below provides a view of the company’s product mix.

It turns out this broad technology base provides Qnity with a unique perspective to advance chiplet designs. Chris explained that chiplets are a simple concept with a complex execution path. One of the primary drivers of this complexity is the fact that chiplets invert typical supply chain dynamics. He explained that the traditional semiconductor supply chain is characterized by low mix/high volume requirements. Due to the many specialized solutions offered by chiplets, the new chiplet supply chain requires a high mix/low volume dynamic.

He explained that chiplet-based design winners will be chosen by performance against high value challenges in many diverse targeted fields of use. The figure below illustrates the wide impact Qnity has on the entire semiconductor value chain. This is unique to Qnity and is the source of its substantial impact on the chiplet market.

Thanks to the incredible breadth of Qnity’s offerings, the company is uniquely positioned to rebalance the semiconductor ecosystem to manage the demands of the new chiplet-based breed of design. Chris described a focus of interdisciplinary investment and innovation to help bring chiplets to fruition with broad and deep collaboration across the supply chain.

If you are contemplating a high-volume chiplet application, Qnity is a company to be aware of, and probably one to work with. You can explore the company’s website here.

To Learn More

Silicon Catalyst has put together a video summary of the Qnity presentation at the Chiplet Summit. You can view it at the EVENTS tab of the Silicon Catalyst website here. There were many other significant events that were part of the Silicon Catalyst session. Other Silicon Catalyst portfolio companies that presented include:

Athos Silicon delivers safe AI for the physical world with a product called Chiptile, the Athos-designed foundational compute chiplet, and the building block of its Multiple Systems on Chip (mSoC) architecture for safety-critical autonomy across robotics, automotive, and aerospace.

CrossFire Technologies tackles Interconnect challenges with an approach called Wire Abundance. No silicon interposer is required, and the product works with current chiplets, SoCs and memory die, delivering a 10X smaller area.

HEPT Lab provides 3D sensors for harsh environments. The HEPT Lab sensor is based on silicon photonics technology that was developed at CalTech for over 10 years. The goal is to make silicon photonics sensors as ubiquitous as cameras.

Quadric delivers a new approach to scalable AI at the edge with a fully programmable stand-alone processor. The architecture is not an accelerator, but rather a processor that is programmable in C++ and Python.

The Silicon Catalyst session ended with a spirited panel discussion. The participants are shown below, and you can replay the panel discussion video on the Silicon Catalyst website here.

And that’s how Qnity and Silicon Catalyst light a path to success at the Chiplet Summit.