A Singapore startup just raised fresh capital to tackle one of chipmaking's hardest open problems: how to actually manufacture chips from materials other than silicon.
Nexstrom, based in Singapore, has raised new funding to develop equipment for manufacturing two-dimensional semiconductor materials at scale. The company wants to build the machinery chip fabs would need to work with these atom-thin materials, which researchers have long eyed as a possible successor to silicon once transistor shrinking hits its physical limits. Details on the funding amount, investors, or a product timeline were not disclosed.
Materials science for 2D semiconductors has advanced for over a decade, but manufacturing them at industrial volume has been the real holdup. That is an equipment problem, not a physics problem - and equipment is where fortunes get made. ASML's near-monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography shows what happens when one company controls a chokepoint that every fab needs; Nexstrom is chasing the same kind of position for the post-silicon era.
Worth remembering: "2D chips are years away" has been a true sentence for roughly fifteen years running. A funding round for the tools doesn't shrink that timeline on its own - it just means someone is finally betting real money on the plumbing.