About Us
Silicon Catalyst is the world’s only incubator focused exclusively on semiconductor solutions (incl. IP, MEMs and Sensors). We accelerate our startups from idea to prototype, and then onto a path to volume production.
We have engaged with over 350 startups worldwide since April 2015 and have admitted 35 exciting companies. Silicon Power Technology, our Chengdu Joint Venture, has accepted 16 startups in China since January 2019.
Our companies participate in a 24-month incubation program; a Silicon Catalyst partner is assigned to each company to advise and advocate for them during this period.
Silicon Catalyst has created a unique and growing ecosystem which provides our startups with everything they need to design, fabricate and market semiconductor solutions.
• In-Kind Partners (TSMC, Synopsys, ARM, ST Micro and over 40 more) – provide each startup several millions of dollars worth of goods and services including EDA tools, IP, PDKs, prototypes, test equipment, design services, packaging and business solutions.
• Strategic Partners (TI, ON Semi, SOITEC, Bosch, Cirrus Logic, ARM and ST Micro) – participate in the selection process and actively look for opportunities to partner with our startups.
• Investors – a path to funding through a large group of VCs, Angels and Angel groups, Corporate VCs, and Family Offices. Silicon Catalyst Angels, an angel group created from our ecosystem, launched July 2019.
• Advisors – a valuable network of industry experts that we match to the specific needs of each startup.
• Universities, Industry Orgs., Incubators, Government Agencies – we nurture dozens of key relationships for the benefit of our portfolio companies and the industry.
Silicon Catalyst’s mission is to help semiconductor startups succeed. Join us in driving innovation!
Startups start here.
it’s about what’s next.®
Why apply to Silicon Catalyst?
What are the benefits?
Why join Silicon Catalyst?
it’s about what’s next.®
APPLICATIONS NOW BEING ACCEPTED
Deadline for new applications is January 11th, 2021
Our global outreach is underway to find early-stage semiconductor startups to join our incubator
Silicon Catalyst is the world’s only incubator focused exclusively on accelerating solutions in silicon.
We address the challenges faced by startups while guiding them from concept to product.
Since April 2015, Silicon Catalyst has reviewed over 350 startups from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The 35 startups admitted since 2015 to the incubator are developing innovative solutions in a variety of areas including energy harvesting, wearables, silicon photonics, memory technology, loT, high performance computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, wireless communications, and biomedical devices.
The Silicon Catalyst incubator utilizes our coalition of in-kind and strategic partners to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of developing semiconductor solutions. With our world-class network of mentors to advise startups, we are addressing their many challenges in moving from idea to realization and business success. We have provided our Portfolio Companies with a path to funding, free access to tools, testing and shuttle runs, along with advice on proper corporate governance and strategic execution.
Silicon Catalyst Portfolio Companies
OCULI makes the SPU™ Sensing and Processing Unit, a complete edge vision system on a chip that overcomes power, bandwidth and latency constraints.
Soft Contact Lens Based Augmented Reality Platform
Visual Dawn is developing a contact lens based AR hardware platform that relies upon the same hydrogel material used for corrective vision contact and sets the gold-standard for comfort. Our system is enabled by a biocompatible battery.
BIOCOMPATIBLE BATTERY
Our biocompatible battery leverages a proprietary chemistry that eliminates the need for toxic electrolyte solution and electrode materials. Further, our chemistry is stable and doesn't exhibit the same catastrophic failure modes seen in lithium based consumer batteries, namely fire and explosion.
OPERATING TIME
Our lens is designed to be disposable, with an 8-hour useful battery life
The next generation 5G network will form the backbone of the fourth industrial revolution. We believe that by 2030 the planet will be blanketed by E-band connectivity. Existing E-band front-ends are bulky (~size of shoe-box), expensive (~$11k) and power hungry – and are not suited for small cell and massive MIMO. Multifractal is addressing this problem by developing fully integrated E-band front-ends on a single chip, in silicon (CMOS / BiCMOS). Our front-end chips will make E-band front-ends so small (size of a match-box), and so cheap (~$20), that they will cover every lamp-post and every street corner!
Multifractal's enabling technology is the ability to create high-Q E-band filters (and diplexers) on-chip in silicon and integrate them directly (still on chip) with the LNA, PA, switches and mixers, all in cheap mass producible silicon. Our customers can then feed the output of our IC directly into the digital back-end, reducing their front-end design, size, cost and effort. They do not have to worry about the RF – we do all that for them! This will enable miniaturization of the entire E-band front-end, for the first time allowing small cell and massive MIMO.
mmTron is the world’s leading provider of innovative mmwave linear power efficient broadband products. Our focus is on high-growth segments of mmwave markets: 5G, 6G, instrumentation, defense, satellite and aerospace communications.
We work with world-class MMIC foundries and collaborate with our customers to deliver superior products, outstanding technical support and uncompromising customer service.
EMPOWERED BY INNOVATION
We are focused on providing a winning edge to our customers through our Innovation. Our R&D and Business teams are driven by this focus. Our customers victory is our victory. That approach has delivered a range of highly innovative products targeted towards the markets we focus-AI,ML & High Performance Computing, Automotive, Datacenter, Enterprise and Consumer.
BUILDING BLOCKS TO ENABLE COMPLETE SOLUTIONS
We build and license best in-class memory solutions for AI,ML & HPC, Automotive, Datacenter, Enterprise and Consumer products. Find the ideal SoC solution for your amazing products.
BEST IN-CLASS IP CORES
Our technologies are instrumental in many key segments. We offer custom features (300+) in our products, so that our customers can create strong product differentiation. We provide a unique mix of products that empowers our customers to explore new market opportunities.
Our Technology provides reliable, high quality data by lighting and capturing all the properties of the optical light field. Instead of using AI to decipher the environment, the technology provides rich, high quality data to enable the predictive power of AI. Our products will support sensing for full autonomy, at a price point to be deployed in Level2 automation (adaptive cruise control, automatic braking)
Compact 60 GHz Radio for Wireless Backhaul
MICROHORN PHASED-ARRAY ANTENNA
The phased array antenna automatically scans and locks onto the strongest signal by electromagnetically shaping and steering the beam. There are no moving parts.
GIGABIT THROUGHPUT
Full bi-directional throughput at gigabit data rates.
60 GHz Wireless Transceiver
COMPACT SIZE
The small antenna size (4 cm x 2.5 cm) is unobtrusive and perfectly suited for mounting in an urban environment.
RANGE TARGET
Support for distances up to several hundred meters.
Consumer Devices
Capacitive Imaging from SigmaSense enables OEMs and ODMs to be first to market the most intuitive, robust and innovative products to consumers.
Large Format Interactive Displays
Fully scalable. Digital. Environmentally resilient. Introducing the next evolution in Large Format Interactive Display capabilities.
Custom Implementations
SigmaSense Sigma-delta Architecture will traverse industries, environments and form factors with virtually limitless potential in application.
Company Websitehttps://www.multifractalsemi.com/
Trameto’s HarvestAll™ power management technology addresses the challenge of powering wireless IoT edge devices. Here, regular battery replacement is prohibitively expensive and environmentally damaging. Our technology overcomes the problem by efficiently and effectively managing even the tiniest amounts of energy as it is harvested from the surrounding environment.
HarvestAll™ power management ICs (PMICs) make energy harvesting viable in a multitude of new applications, including smart buildings, consumer electronics, asset monitoring, agriculture, wearables, healthcare and home automation.
Your processor needs a bodyguard.
Dover Microsystems’ CoreGuard® technology is the only solution for embedded systems that prevents the exploitation of software vulnerabilities and immunizes processors against entire classes of network-based attacks.
Forget Everything You Know About Cybersecurity
On average, all complex software contains up to 50 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. So, it’s no surprise that nearly every cyberattack relies on exploiting a software vulnerability. Today’s cybersecurity solutions focus on building defensive software around networks and applications to protect our embedded systems. Rather than securing the system, this approach actually increases a system’s vulnerability by adding yet another layer of inherently flawed software. As a result, companies and individuals are left even more exposed.
Owl Autonomous Imaging has recently completed and delivered a two-color infrared camera for the US Air Force. Leveraging this technology and the associated patent portfolio, Owl AI is now developing a 4D-camera that combines 1550nm Flash-LiDAR and Thermal imaging (IR) within a single solid-state mega-pixel focal plane, targeting ADAS and Autonomous vehicles. This is a unique sensor fusion solution for the industry.
Owl AI was co-founded by Chuck Gershman. Mr. Gershman has 30 years of semiconductor industry experience in executive management, marketing, engineering, business development, sales, consulting and executive advising. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Gershman has been a member of the executive team of five startups, three of which as CEO/COO. He has had successful exits with acquisitions by Intel and PMC-Sierra. Further company information can be found at www.owlai.us
Eridan Communications is a fabless technology company developing the devices and firmware for the next generation of communications hardware for 5G and beyond. We’re based in Silicon Valley, but we leverage technology partners and resources from around the world.
Quadric believes the road to an autonomous future must be completely re-architected. As the need for speed becomes more important than ever for millisecond decision-making in machines, data doesn’t have time to go round-trip to the cloud. Advanced edge computing is the answer, but requires a start-from-scratch approach. By combining high performance computing with the most sophisticated artificial intelligence, Quadric’s technology is helping to realize the promise of the future: where cars will finally commute safely for us, where industrial robots will complete critical tasks, where humans will communicate with machines like never before.
SPARK is the enabling wireless technology of the future. Its efficiency, agility and robustness allow it to address a large number of markets, many of which are ill-served by current wireless technologies. The SPARK Radio is a wireless transceiver that is more effective than any existing technology, increasing the energy efficiency of wireless communication and enhancing battery life. This is made possible by a unique architecture that provides an order of magnitude better energy efficiency than the state-of-the-art, and this improvement is achieved through key circuit and system level innovations. Our goal is to significantly extend the limited battery life of electronics that require short-range wireless communications, as well as to increase the robustness and agility of their wireless links.
Espre Technologies is an innovative solutions provider developing technologies related to next generation wireless products. The company holds intellectual property related to Internet of Things (IoT) for 5G networks and embedded cooperative network solutions, carrier aggregation techniques in LTE, and A.I. applications related to real-time user wireless data capture and analytics. Espre has developed and patented an industry disruptive communications protocol that is designed to integrate within existing WiFi and cellular networks.
Espre was founded by Dr. John Terry, a recognized industry expert in wireless communication system design in the areas of chaos communications, WLAN & OFDM networks, and carrier aggregation for LTE and WiFi networks. Dr. Terry has generated over 50 issued / pending domestic and foreign patents related to wireless technology. Further company information can be found at www.espretech.com
5DSENSING makes innovating CMOS sensors enabling Smart Cameras for Safe City applications 5DSENSING is an Israeli startup company that designs a future CMOS sensor with 2D NIR + 3D flash ToF for smart and safe city markets. With our sensor, a new generation of smart cameras is feasible allowing huge cost reduction of safe city installation and maintenance. We are integrating ultra low light, active night vision and 3D point cloud into a single sensor. These cameras will have big advantages over existing generations with minor additional cost.
Artificial Intelligence is here, not only to stay, but to change our world. A long time ago Humans invented the wheel to move faster and to help relieve their muscles from heavy jobs. Today, we humans are shaping and developing the AI, to help our most important muscle, the brain, to go further and open new unthinkable landscapes, new opportunities and new jobs. Mentium has the technology to bring ultra-fast AI to low power electronics, like cameras, sensors, microphones, wearable accessories, and bring the performances of autonomous vehicles and AI cloud computing to a whole new level.
Our architecture is based on Non-Volatile Memory devices used to carry out analog in-memory computation, eliminating the memory transfer bottleneck and exploiting the inherent efficiency of analog computation. Analog computing is an old concept abandoned a long time ago due to its troubles dealing with variations and noise, leading to low precision computation. Mentium Technologies Inc. solved these issues and our technology showed incredible resilience to temperature and device variations: we are able to deliver extremely fast and efficient AI computation.
Zeno Semiconductor, Inc. develops and licenses novel memory and logic technologies, which provide innovative paths to scaling semiconductor devices. The memory and logic technologies are manufacturable on mainstream CMOS and FinFET fabrication processes, with no new materials or equipments, with no changes to any of the existing libraries and IPs. Zeno currently has been awarded more than 50 patents.
High Speed High Resolution Lowest Power
Our patented Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) beat the competition by 10x
LIDAR ADCs for
Autonomous Vehicles
LIDAR ADCs for
Autonomous Vehicles
Next-gen comm. wireless
and wireline ADCs
Portable medical imaging
ADCs (1st customer)
Analog bottleneck
400 MHz BW 10-bit ADCs
Analog bottleneck
800 MHz BW 11-bit ADCs
Analog bottleneck
45 MHz BW 15-bit ADCs
Current ADCs cannot address next-generation bottlenecks
Lower supply voltages limits headroom and accuracy for high resolution medical imaging
Poorer "analog" transistors in lower nodes of CMOS limit bandwidth for LiDAR/5G
SMI ADCs lower system cost
Single voltage supply operation
Robust jitter tolerance
Oversampled architecture
Resistive input, easier to drive
Today there is an ever-increasing demand for portable devices with extended battery life as well as greater performance. However, the supply is being limited by the efficiency of the processors and displays that comprise two of the largest energy consumers within those portable devices.
In response to the power-efficiency dilemma facing manufacturers of portable consumer electronics, Power Down Semiconductor developed Low Power Processing (or LPP™). The technology uses a “pseudo-adiabatic” technique to recycle charge and prevent CV2f losses in memory blocks, clock buffers, GPIO, and displays.
Probius Diagnostics is developing an application-agnostic, embedded point-of-care (PoC) diagnostic.
The agnostic, broad-spectrum nature of our solution makes it reconfigurable for assays of proteins without the need for specific probe or label. This is unprecedented and very compelling for a wide range of PoC applications, such as rapid screening in urgent care settings, clinical trials for pharmaceutical research, ambulatory endocrine response monitoring in chronic diseases and personalized therapeutics, as well as in-field diagnostics for biothreats and food/water quality monitoring.
EcoCircuits is young fabless semiconductor company. We develop and provide smart and cost effective power management silicon solutions (PMIC) that increase the maximum power capability of batteries. Typical applications are wireless Smart Home and IoT devices. Our technology enables the use of low cost Coin Celland Lithium Thionyl Chloride batteries in these power demanding applications. We are exploring new business opportunities where our solution can boost the product performance and maximize the lifetime of batteries.
Xceler Systems is developing a new kind of processor and platform to enable the next generation Intelligent Edge. The brain-like graph engine is built using “Digital Neurons,” with the ability to dynamically form thousands of synapses every clock cycle for computing. This Neuromorphic processor does not require the developer to learn new languages or design flows and works with a C/C++ front end.
Xceler graph processor (XGE) and the Xceler graph compiler (XGC) will enable customers to implement supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms such as association, classification and clustering to solve problems with real time constraints, on the edge. Xceler processors will provide orders of magnitude better performance at substantially lower power.
The EdgeOps™ platform is highly scalable and adaptable
– Edge Intelligent Operations platform
– Unpackage autonomous functionality
– Improve efficiency of operational equipment
– Introduce self-adaptive automation systems
– Predictive Analytics integrated with OT data
– Increase availability with self-adaptive functionality
One Silicon Chip Photonics’ (OSCP’s) mission is to produce simple, light, low-cost, low-power, high-performance Micro-Opto-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MOEMS) components and integrate them on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) substrates to create sensors for different applications, in particular motion sensors to measure acceleration or rotation of an object.
REX Computing is developing a new, hyper-efficient processor architecture targeting the requirements for the supercomputers of today, and all the computers of tomorrow.
To do this, we are throwing out the feature creep and bloat of processors of the past 30 years, and using improvements in the world of software to greatly simplify the processor itself to only what is necessary.
In doing so, we are able to deliver a 10 to 25x increase in energy efficiency for the same performance level compared to existing GPU and CPU systems
Active Layer Parametrics (ALP Inc.) has developed a system to rapidly and accurately measure mobility and activated carrier concentration profiles with Angstrom-level resolution for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. These profiles detail the depth of electrical activation due to implant-anneal recipes. We're the only system in the world that is capable of doing these measurements on a routine basis. The goal of the company is: Improve Yield by Quick Feedback: Instead having to wait for weeks to get devices made, we could do that in a matter of minutes. Improve Device performance: By tracking process changes to electronic impact - we currently do this 'matrix-analysis'.
GMK is a fabless semiconductor startup company that provides analog and digital mixed IC and related software platform. Based on a proprietary patent portfolio, GMK is creating single-wire connectivity markets starting with smartphones and smart accessories, to IoT and wearables, on through to automotive and smart factory.
Ayar Labs helps companies keep up with skyrocketing volumes of data by miniaturizing fiber optic transceivers and making them in silicon chips, bringing the super-high bandwidths and low energy use of fiber optics inside computers.
AEPONYX is a fabless micro optical switch semiconductor start-up designing and marketing chips for fiber optic access to the cloud.
With its patented and patent pending technologies, combining planar Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) and Silicon Photonics, AEPONYX is building the fastest, most affordable and smallest micro optical switches for use in disaggregated switching systems and enabling tunability in both transmission and reception in pluggable transceivers.
The ever-increasing demand for network connectivity, fueled by mobile devices, video content, cloud applications, Internet of things and social networks, is the source of ever increasing power consumption issues for telecom service providers and data center operators.
This creates opportunities for optical circuit switching and a new generation of tunable transceivers, increasing the capacity on both ends of the optical fiber while lowering power consumption.
By combining Silicon Photonics with MEMS, AEPONYX is creating a unique platform that can support the next generation of optical communications.
AEPONYX’s micro optical switches are 100x faster, 10x cheaper and 10x smaller than the 3D MEMS used in commercial products within data centers and by telecom service providers.
Their speed and cost point open the door to several new applications for equipment manufacturers within fiber optic access networks, mobile networks, data centers and high performance computing.
Moreover, since optical switching can significantly reduce both power consumption as well as latency, equipment manufacturers, telecom and data center network operators have the opportunity to use optical switching to not only reduce their environmental footprint, but also to improve their services differentiation.
AEPONYX will be the market leader in MEMS-based Silicon Photonics.
Our Vision
We are a Singapore-based company established to provide world-class compelling and affordable solutions to improve connectivity and quality of life for everyone.
Our Mission
Gigabits wireless connectivity to allow better and timely services everywhere, for everyone.
Research and Development
Collaborating with distinguished Singapore Government Research Agency A*STAR, we have the accessibility to Singapore vibrant research talents and wide range of Intellectual Properties and Patents Portfolio.
Design and Implementation
Experienced in wireless communications protocol and standardization. We have the competencies from system design and simulations to ASIC realization.
Customization of Solution
We work closely with Industry Partners to deliver customized solutions for their products and customers' requirement.