Trying to make sense of all the complex components of a computer chip can be a headache, those layers of microscopic components that are interconnected by a copper wire "highway", in some places thinner than a human hair.
There is an insulating material called a dielectric between these wires to ensure that the wires do not come into contact with each other and short circuit. Further amplification, between the chip and the underlying structure there is a special dielectric, this material is called a dielectric film and is made of thin sheets as thin as white blood cells.
For 30 years, a Japanese company called Ajinomoto has made billions of dollars by making such flakes. Competitors have struggled to keep up, and today Ajinomoto still holds more than 90% of the market.
But now, a Berkeley, California-based startup is working on a new product in an attempt to compete with Ajinomoto and bring this small portion of the chip manufacturing supply chain back to the United States.
The company is called Thintronics, and its materials (products) are specifically designed to meet the computing needs of the AI era. The company claims that the new material has better insulation properties and, if widely adopted, means faster computing and lower energy costs for data centers.
Spurred by the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, the company is at the forefront of the semiconductor industry along with other U.S. companies. The bill seeks to give the United States a greater say in the semiconductor industry, especially in several segments that are currently dominated by a handful of international companies.
But to succeed, Thintronics and its peers must overcome a series of challenges, solve technical problems, break down long-established industry relationships, and convince global semiconductor giants to embrace new suppliers.
Stefan Pastine, founder and CEO of Thintronics, said: "It's very difficult to invent a new material platform and bring it to the world. This is not for the faint of heart. ”
The bottleneck of the insulator
The name Ajinomoto may sound like it has little to do with chips: the company is better known for being the world's leading supplier of MSG flavored powders.
In the 90s of the 20th century, Ajinomoto discovered that a by-product of MSG was a good insulator, and since then, it has almost monopolized this niche material.
But Ajinomoto doesn't produce anything else for chips. In fact, the insulation materials in the chip rely on a fragmented supply chain: one layer uses Ajinomoto materials, another layer uses another company's materials, and so on, which are not optimized and integrated.
When the data is transmitted over a short distance, the insulation system can work normally, but when the distance becomes longer, such as the transmission between chips, weak insulators can become bottlenecks, wasting energy and slowing down the calculation speed.
This is a growing concern, especially as AI becomes more expensive to train and consumes more energy (Ajinomoto did not respond to a request for comment).
Pastin is a chemist who sold his company specializing in hard plastic recycling to an industrial chemicals company in 2019.
Since then, he has come to believe that the chemical industry is slow to innovate, and he believes that the same problems are holding chipmakers back from finding better insulating materials.
In the chip industry, he said, insulators are "a bit of a marginal figure" and are nowhere near as far as transistors and other chip components.
That same year, he founded Thintronics with the hope of finding better insulators to provide faster computing speeds for data centers at a lower cost.
The idea was not groundbreaking, and many people were constantly researching and experimenting with new insulators, but Pastin believed he could find the right chemistry to make a breakthrough.
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Thintronics says it will manufacture different insulators for all layers of the chip, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing production lines.
Pastin told me that many industry players are currently testing these materials. But he declined to provide his name, citing a non-disclosure agreement, and was also reluctant to disclose technical details.
Without more technical details, it's difficult to compare Thintronics' materials to competing products from other companies. The company recently tested the Dk (dielectric constant) of its materials, which measures the insulating ability of a material.
The results were evaluated by researcher Venky Sundaram, who founded several semiconductor startups but had no ties to Thintronics.
He says that compared to other multilayer films, the dielectric category that Thintronics is developing, their Dk values are impressive, better than any other material available today.
There's a long way to go
Thintronics' efforts have garnered some support. The company received a $20 million Series A funding round led by venture capital firms Translink and Maverick in March 2024, as well as a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The company is also seeking funding from the CHIPS Act. The bill, which became law in 2022, aims to promote the growth of semiconductor companies such as Thintronics, thereby bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. and reducing reliance on foreign suppliers.
A year after the bill became law, the government said more than 450 companies had submitted letters of intent to try to secure funding.
Most of the bill's funding will go to large manufacturing plants, such as Intel's new factory in New Mexico and TSMC's new factory in Arizona. But U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she hopes small companies can also get funding, especially in the materials sector.
In February 2024, applications are open for a $300 million pool dedicated to materials innovation. While Thintronics declined to say how much funding it is seeking or from which projects, the company does see the CHIPS Act as a big push.
But insulation-related products, which currently rely on dozens of companies around the world, want to build a U.S.-native chip supply chain, which means reversing the trend of specialization that has been shaped in different countries for decades. Industry experts say today's dominant insulator suppliers are hard to shake, and they're used to fighting new competitors.
"For more than 20 years, Ajinomoto has held more than 90% of the market share," Sandalam said. This is unheard of in most industries, and it's clear that they don't rely on one size or two to achieve this. ”
One challenge is that the dominant insulation manufacturers have decades-long partnerships with chip design companies such as Nvidia and AMD, as well as chipmakers such as TSMC. Asking these big players in the industry to change materials is very difficult to achieve.
"The semiconductor industry is very conservative. Larry Zhao, a semiconductor researcher who has worked in the dielectric industry for more than 25 years, says, "They like to use suppliers they know very well, with guaranteed quality." ”
Thintronics also faced a technical hurdle: As with other chip components, the manufacturing standards for insulating materials were very precise and difficult to achieve. Ajinomoto dominates the insulation, which is not as thick as a human hair.
The material must also be able to open holes, which are small holes that hold wires that pass vertically through the film. Sandalam said that each new iteration is a large-scale R&D effort, and the established companies have the upper hand because they have years of experience in this area.
If all of this can be done in the lab, there is another obstacle ahead: materials must retain these properties when they are produced in large quantities, and Sandalam has seen a lot of companies fail here in the past.
"Over the years, I have advised several material suppliers who have tried to break down barriers to the Ajinomoto business, but they have not been successful in the end, and they have encountered unsolvable problems when it comes to mass production," he says. ”
Despite the challenges, one thing could work in Thintronics' favor: for the first time, U.S. tech giants like Microsoft and Meta have made progress in designing their own chips.
They plan to use the chips for in-house AI (model) training, as well as as cloud computing services, both of which will reduce the industry's reliance on Nvidia.
Microsoft, Google, and Meta declined to comment on whether they were pushing for advances in materials like insulators.
But Sundaram said these companies may be more willing to work with new American startups than to stick to the usual way of making chips: "They are much more open to the supply chain than the existing big companies." ”
About the author: James O'Donnell is an artificial intelligence journalist for MIT Technology Review who focuses on the promise and risks of technologies such as self-driving cars, surgical robots, and chatbots. PRIOR TO JOINING MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, HE WORKED AT FRONTLINE PBS, AN INVESTIGATIVE NEWS OUTLET. His articles have been published in The Washington Post, ProPublica, WNYC, and other media outlets.
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