Dr. Daniel Schall is CEO and Co-Founder of Black Semiconductor. He holds a PhD in graphene optoelectronics from RWTH Aachen University. His work has shaped integrated photonics for over a decade, driving innovation in chip-to-chip communication. As co-founder of Black Semiconductor, his focus is on rethinking current solutions and forging new possibilities in the semiconductor industry.
Tell us about your company?
Black Semiconductor is a deep-tech start-up addressing a fundamental bottleneck of chip-to-chip communication with a new electronic-photonic production technology which will enable AI to scale. We will accomplish this with integrated graphene photonics technology—Black Semiconductor IGP™. FabONE, our 300mm facility designed to integrate electronics and photonics in a single production flow with graphene, will be operational by the end of 2026. It will be the first of its kind in the industry. Founded in 2020 in Germany, we have grown to 140 people representing 30 nationalities—a team with decades of fab, engineering, and technology experience. We inspire the world to re-thinking computing.
What problem is Black Semiconductor solving and why hasn’t it been solved before?
The bottleneck in computing used to be inside the chip. Now it’s between them.
Today’s systems weren’t built to deliver what we demand from AI compute. And it’s not a because the chips themselves aren’t powerful enough (they are) the problem is they can’t communicate fast enough with each other.
For fifty years, the answer was the same: make transistors smaller. That compounding produced ten million billion times more computing power than the first electronic computers. But scaling has reached its limits and the industry’s response has been to split computation across multiple chips. And that’s where a barrier lives: chip-to-chip connection, and especially copper interconnects. They are slow and bleed energy as heat. Today’s data centers are already connecting to power sources measured in hundreds of megawatts. This is the output of a nuclear power plant. It’s not a sustainable trajectory.
One solution has already emerged with increasing adoption: photonics. The industry understands the advantages of using optical signals to transmit data between chips. The challenge has been doing it in a manufacturable way, at production scale, and at viable cost. That’s where integrated graphene photonics enters the picture, and that’s where Black Semiconductor starts.
What is Black Semiconductor IGPTM technology and why does graphene specifically make it possible?
Graphene has one property that makes it uniquely suited to this application. It’s also the same property that made it fail everywhere else people tried.
When graphene was first isolated, the assumption was that we’d finally found the material for single-atom transistors. It was a genuine disappointment when we had to admit that wasn’t going to work. But the same property that ruled it out for transistors (the absence of a gap in the band structure) turns out to be precisely the advantage for broad-band photonic properties. The thing that made it fail in one application made it uniquely suited to this one.
Conventional semiconductor materials absorb only specific wavelengths of light. Graphene absorbs any wavelength across a broad spectrum. It responds to optical signals at extremely high speeds. And because it’s carbon, integrating it onto a silicon wafer is compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Black Semiconductor IGPTM technology (IGP stands for integrated graphene photonics) is the platform we’ve developed to bring this to production. It integrates electronic and photonic functionality on a single device, on a single wafer, and it’s produced in one manufacturing flow. An electronic, photonic integrated circuit with graphene doing both the modulator and photodetector function natively.
Some performance numbers: Black Semiconductor IGPTM technology enables at least 100x system scaling compared to current copper-based interconnects. Production cost is a fraction of current alternatives.
The reason this hasn’t been done before is that integrating graphene at production scale required solving a set of process engineering problems that took years of research to crack. That research is what we’re founded on, and the pilot fab we are building this year, FabONE, is where it becomes manufacturable.
What is FabONE? And what makes it different from any other semiconductor fab in the world?
FabONE is the world’s first scalable 2D manufacturing facility designed specifically to integrate electronics and photonics in a single production flow, on 300mm wafers, using graphene.
That configuration does not exist anywhere else. Located in Aachen, Germany, there is no other fab in the world set up to do what FabONE will do with 2D materials.
The equipment in FabONE will be off-the-shelf semiconductor standard from tier-1 tool providers. The facility design and cleanroom are being built with Exyte, one of the world’s leading semiconductor facility specialists. At the beginning of this year, construction for the manufacturing floor started through this partnership.
What makes FabONE unique is the process architecture that connects each of these tier-1 tools. The specific configuration of each piece of equipment, the process flows, the material handling — everything has been designed around the requirements of 2D material (graphene) and photonic device manufacturing. That is proprietary, and it has never been done before at scale. Our pilot production is on track for 2027 while optimizing processes to transition to volume production by 2029.
You acquired Applied Nanolayers in 2025. What does that bring to Black Semiconductor, and why was the timing important?
Applied Nanolayers, now called Black Semiconductor Netherlands (BNL), brings more than ten years of expertise in industrial graphene production. Bringing that capability in-house was a deliberate decision timed to FabONE.
When we said we would build the first 300mm graphene photonics fab in the world, our material supply chain became a strategic and technical decision. The quality, consistency, and process compatibility of the graphene layer is fundamental to device performance. We developed own production methods before the acquisition, but the ANL team had solved most of the problems we were working on. Having that wafer-scale fabrication capability inside the company, is critical for a successful technology development. It was an opportunity for both sides because the now-BNL-team had a very clear chance to transition the technology to volume production in a top-notch environment.
The BNL team brings a deep expertise in graphene process engineering that is not available elsewhere in the industry. That knowledge, integrated with our process team, is part of what makes the FabONE build credible at the pace we’re executing it.
We acquired the company when we secured FabONE as a facility. The integration is running in parallel with the facility build, so by the time pilot production begins in 2027, the material supply chain is internal, optimised, and fully under our process control.
What’s already in motion at Black Semiconductor and what can we expect to see throughout 2026 and 2027?
2026 is the year the facility is finished. 2027 is the year it produces chips.
In 2026, construction started on the manufacturing floor at FabONE and tool move-in begins in the second half of the year. In early 2027, FabONE begins development and subsequently pilot production operations. By 2029, our target is volume production.
The data from our 200mm demo-wafer runs is coming in. Once the pilot line is fully running, this is where you’ll see the learning cycle pace accelerate. Each process run feeds the next, and the cycles compress fast. That’s one of the things people underestimate about getting a fab operational. Getting the equipment in is indeed a big step, but what the equipment lets you learn is where we make leaps toward scale.
On the system side, integration work is starting now. We expect the technical results and the system-level evidence in 2028 and this is the year we begin to move toward volume production, with full capacity in 2029. 2028 is when you’ll be able to see what we’re doing come together as a manufacturable technology, built to the standard the industry knows, but with 2D materials.
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