Multibeam lands $140m CHIPS Act LOI for advanced packaging R&D
Multibeam Corporation has signed a Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $140 million in proposed federal funding from the CHIPS Research and Development Office. The Sunnyvale-based firm said the money would accelerate development of next-generation fine-pitch advanced packaging process flows for U.S. chip makers, with initial applications targeting AI and high-performance computing workloads.
The funding, if finalised, would support Multibeam's MBX platform, a multi-column electron-beam lithography (MEBL) system the company positions as enabling rapid prototyping and production of heterogeneous chiplet architectures. Multibeam said the platform can reduce chip-to-chip power consumption by more than 10x compared to conventional approaches, and that it shortens development cycles by allowing faster design-change iterations. The company did not disclose which U.S. chip makers are currently engaged as customers or partners, nor did it provide a timeline for when commercial process flows would be available.
The technology challenge
Advanced packaging has emerged as one of the defining battlegrounds in semiconductor performance as conventional transistor scaling slows. Connecting multiple chiplets at fine pitch, whether for memory-on-logic stacks, photonics integration, or wafer-scale systems, demands extremely tight dimensional tolerances that standard photolithography tools were not originally designed to meet. Multibeam argues that electron-beam lithography, with its maskless patterning capability, offers a more flexible and reconfigurable path for low-volume, high-complexity integration work.
Ken MacWilliams, Multibeam's president, said the partnership with the Department of Commerce would allow the company to "accelerate rapid production of next-generation semiconductors" and provide U.S. innovators with the ability to move from concept to production quickly. He described the MBX platform as capable of supporting "increasingly complex heterogeneous device architectures" including silicon photonics and novel multi-chip system designs.
Bill Frauenhofer, the Department of Commerce's executive director for semiconductor innovation and investment, said accelerating domestic advanced packaging with photonics integration would give American industry the bandwidth and energy efficiency needed to scale complex AI workloads.
Market and policy context
The announcement sits squarely within the CHIPS and Science Act's R&D funding strand, which is separate from the larger fabrication incentive awards to companies such as TSMC, Intel and Samsung. The R&D office has been directing funds toward manufacturing technology gaps, of which advanced packaging is considered a critical one. The U.S. has historically relied on Asian contract packagers for high-end integration work, and building domestic capability is a stated policy priority.
Multibeam's approach is differentiated from incumbents such as ASML and applied materials-linked packaging tool vendors in that electron-beam lithography targets lower-volume, higher-mix development workloads rather than high-throughput mass production. Whether the MBX platform can ultimately serve volume production, or remains a rapid-prototyping tool, will determine its commercial ceiling. A number of well-funded startups and established equipment vendors are also pursuing chiplet interconnect solutions, making competitive positioning in this segment increasingly active.
The Letter of Intent is not a binding award. Federal funding agreements of this scale typically proceed through a further due-diligence and negotiation phase before a formal agreement is executed. Multibeam and the Department of Commerce did not specify a target date for converting the LOI into a signed contract.