BEAM Technologies, a startup spun out of RIKEN, announced on 24 June that it had secured ¥220m (about $1.4m) in a seed funding round.
The company was founded in 2022. Its chief executive, Kazuki Iimura, has also served as team leader of a virus-inactivation LED system research team at RIKEN, and has founded several startups.
Why grow semiconductor crystals in space
Semiconductors are minutely engineered products, and their manufacture is affected by gravity. As a crystal grows, gravity creates differences in density that drive buoyancy convection and the sedimentation of particles, which can in turn produce defective units. In the language the semiconductor industry watches closely, this means the “yield” deteriorates.
BEAM Technologies therefore intends to grow crystals in the microgravity environment of space. When it grew AlGaN crystals on a microgravity simulator it had developed in-house, it says it achieved a substantial homogenisation of the distributions of temperature, concentration and flow velocity compared with conditions on the ground.
On 25 June, the day after disclosing the fundraise, BEAM Technologies announced that it had signed memorandums of understanding on a low-Earth-orbit semiconductor-manufacturing business with Japan LEO Shachu, Resonac and others.
What the CEO’s comments reveal about demand for manufacturing in space
The seed round drew several venture-capital firms, the pipe-maker Shinnichi Kogyo and individual investors.
The company says the money will go towards “scaling up its semiconductor-manufacturing platform business that harnesses the microgravity environment”. The first stage appears to be working out an appropriate manufacturing method on the ground and building the equipment.
Mr Iimura said: “As we have pursued this work, many semiconductor manufacturers have brought us an extraordinary range of needs across materials and applications. We were not the only ones running up against the limits of the ground. That response has further strengthened our conviction about commercialising the business.” He added: “We will make, in space, semiconductor crystals of a quality unreachable on the ground, and the whole team will press ahead so that we can connect this to the real-world deployment of the next generation of semiconductors that will underpin AI and high-speed, high-capacity communications.”
