Apr. 20—Homegrown Albuquerque startup 3D Glass Solutions received a new, $30 million venture investment to ramp up local production of its proprietary, advanced semiconductor chips, the company announced Wednesday.
3D Glass, which launched in 2006, has created a novel, glass-ceramic material dubbed APEXGlass that allows it to produce chips that are more powerful, efficient and cheaper to make than traditional chips created with standard silicon. That's because APEXGlass makes it easy to etch three-dimensional electronics components into chips at the microscopic level in a way that's difficult to do with things like silicon or other laminates.
The company previously raised about $40 million in private equity, which helped it build out a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing plant near the Balloon Fiesta Park, where it's now producing wafers and customized chips for customers that make communications-related components and devices that are used in everything from cellphones to radar systems and aerospace applications.
The new investment will now allow 3D Glass to immensely ramp up its wafer production for those markets, while also creating new, customized chip designs for use in additional industry applications, such as industrial power electronics and data centers, said 3D Glass President and CEO Babu Mandava.
"We're getting a lot of good traction with our customer base and expanding our products and markets," Mandava told the Journal. "We raised this new financing to increase our production capacity at our existing facility."
The company currently has capacity to produce about 4,000, six-inch wafers per year. But by June, it expects to increase that annual capacity to 18,000 six-inch wafers, Mandava said. And, by next year, it expects to expand the wafers to 8 inches and increase output to 20,000 per year.
Expanding to 8-inch wafers will increase the electronics capacity of each wafer by 70%.
"It increases the electronics that customers can put on the wafer, or substrate, that we produce," Mondava said. "We're a substrate supplier, and people put their chips on the substrates."
As for customized wafers and chip designs — known as 3D heterogeneous packaging — the company makes three-dimensional chips whereby it stacks the wafers on top of each other, allowing electronics to be etched into a lot more spaces for greater power, efficiency and capability to do more things.
"We're doing that today," Mondava said. "But with the new financing we'll expand it to make customized chips for more industry applications and move from low-volume to high-volume production."