Thintronics signs $50m CHIPS Act LOI to build US substrate ILD platform
Thintronics, an Alameda, California-based semiconductor materials startup, has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with the US Department of Commerce's CHIPS Research and Development Office for up to $50 million in incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act. The funds are intended to accelerate commercialisation of the company's proprietary ultra-low-loss, non-polar interlayer dielectric (ILD) technology for advanced semiconductor substrates used in AI compute, high-performance computing, advanced networking, and chiplet-based packaging.
The LOI is not a binding award. Subject to finalisation, the proposed incentives would fund a vertically integrated US substrate ILD platform covering materials development, ILD manufacturing, rapid substrate prototyping, qualification, and integration with outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) partners.
Why substrate ILD matters now
The interlayer dielectric is the insulating material within a package substrate that governs signal integrity, electrical loss, and power efficiency as data moves between a chip and the wider system. Chief executive Stefan Pastine argued that as Moore's Law approaches practical limits, interconnect and packaging are becoming as strategically important as the silicon itself. "The future of AI won't be determined by silicon alone. It will be determined by how efficiently we connect it," he said.
The company's CTO, Tristan Ossama El Bouayadi, noted that incumbent ILD materials were designed for the CPU era and are ill-suited to the bandwidth and loss requirements of AI systems migrating to 448G networking and, eventually, terabit-class interconnects. Thintronics says its material is engineered to be compatible with existing substrate manufacturing infrastructure, which it argues allows faster customer qualification than a clean-sheet alternative would.
The strategic context for government intervention is pointed. Thintronics cites industry data suggesting that approximately 98% of the advanced substrate ILD market is currently supplied by a single non-US company, a concentration that has drawn scrutiny as a critical supply-chain vulnerability alongside better-known chokepoints in leading-edge logic and high-bandwidth memory. Backers include Maverick Silicon, Translink Capital, M Ventures, TGVP and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-linked venture fund, which signals the technology's relevance to US defence and intelligence programmes.
Market and regulatory context
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 allocated roughly $52 billion in total for semiconductor manufacturing and R&D incentives in the United States. The CHIPS R&D Office manages a subset of that envelope focused specifically on advanced packaging, materials and ecosystem development, reflecting policymakers' view that US competitiveness gaps extend well beyond front-end fabrication. Thintronics' LOI sits within that packaging and materials mandate rather than the larger fabrication-facility awards that have gone to TSMC, Intel and Samsung.
The broader advanced packaging market is already crowded with investment. TSMC's CoWoS interposer technology, Intel Foundry's EMIB and Foveros platforms, and a growing roster of OSAT providers in Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia are all scaling capacity for chiplet integration. What remains comparatively thin is US-based materials supply for the substrate layer specifically, which is where Thintronics is positioning itself.
Export-control dynamics add urgency. The US Bureau of Industry and Security has progressively tightened controls on advanced semiconductor equipment and certain materials. A domestically sourced, commercially qualified ILD would reduce exposure to potential retaliatory restrictions on the foreign-supplied equivalent.
Thintronics has not disclosed revenue, customer names, or a timeline for volume production beyond the broad framing of the proposed incentive programme. Investors and potential substrate customers will be watching for qualification milestones with named OSAT partners and independent validation of the company's loss and bandwidth benchmarks as the programme advances.