Lace, a Norway-headquartered chipmaking equipment startup backed by Microsoft, has raised $40 million in a series A round to develop lithography tools that use a helium atom beam instead of light.
The round was led by Atomico and included Microsoft’s venture arm, M12, Linse Capital, the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation, and Nysnø, while Lace did not disclose its valuation.
Chipmakers such as TSMC and Intel use ASML’s light-based lithography systems, and Lace’s approach could print far smaller features by using a beam about 0.1 nanometer wide.
CEO Bodil Holst told Reuters the method could enable designs about 10 times smaller than today’s tools, and Imec’s John Petersen said the concept could push feature sizes down by an order of magnitude.
Lace has prototypes and aims for a test tool in a pilot fab around 2029, and presented an invited paper at a lithography summit in February.
Lace’s technology stems from a decade of European research
Lace’s atom-beam approach grew out of FabouLACE, a European Union-funded effort to build a mask-less patterning method for a 2-nanometer process.
A related program, NanoLACE, received €3.36 million in funding from 2019 through 2024.
- The European Commission authorized Lace to bring the technology to market by 2031, while imec, a Belgium-based semiconductor R&D institute, will monitor and verify performance.
- Public support ties Lace to a wider European push to advance semiconductor manufacturing technology, beyond venture capital funding alone.
- The search for ASML alternatives extends beyond atom beams
- Lace’s funding fits into a wider hunt for next-step lithography options outside ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems.
- Laser-produced plasma (LPP) EUV sources waste much of their input power, and one retired researcher estimated the overall EUV-LPP electro-optical conversion efficiency may fall below 0.1%.
- U.S. startups xLight and Inversion Semiconductor are building particle-accelerator-based light sources, which they say can deliver more output with better energy use 1.
- Research groups in Japan are working on free-electron lasers that could be 10 to 100 times more efficient, adding another path in a global effort to ease lithography bottlenecks.
