German companiesSemronRecently raised $7.9 million (€7.3 million) to advance 3D packaging technology in mobile devicesAI ChipsEfficiency improvement. Dresden-based Semron said its goal is to set new standards for AI chips in mobile devices to meet the industry's evolving needs.
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The financing, led by Join Capital and supported by SquareOne, OTB Ventures, and Onsight Ventures, is intended to provide Semron with financial support for semiconductor innovation at a time when Moore's Law is slowing. In an era dominated by the demand for increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities, Semron is committed to developing advanced computer chips to power the smallest consumer devices such as smartphones, headsets, and virtual reality headsets.
Semron's innovation lies in its 3D semiconductor technology, which promises to improve chip efficiency by up to 20 times. This efficiency improvement allows running AI models that are 1,000 times larger while maintaining the same chip size. Semron's proprietary technology, called CapRAM, utilizes a new semiconductor device architecture based on variable capacitors ('memcapacitors'). Unlike traditional methods that rely on current and transistors, CapRAM significantly reduces the movement of electrons, resulting in a 20-fold increase in chip-level energy efficiency.
The seed round, led by Join Capital, attracted new investors including SquareOne, OTB Ventures, and Hermann Hauser of Onsight Ventures. Previous seed investors such as Wolfram Drescher (BlueWonder), Andreas Werner and Sven Sieber (Gigahertz Ventures), and former TSMC President Hans Rohrer also continued to support Semron.
Semron's CapRAM technology represents a major leap forward in developing the most energy-efficient semiconductors for AI inference. The use of variable capacitors instead of current reduces noise and energy consumption, achieving a 20x improvement in energy efficiency. Notably, Semron's chips can utilize three-dimensional space without overheating, supporting AI models that are two to three hundred times larger than current capacity, with the potential to scale up to 1,000 times in the future.
The technology utilizes conventional semiconductor materials and eliminates the need for extensive development in production, potentially saving up to $108 million (€100 million) in development costs.
“Computing resources will become the ‘oil’ of the 21st century,” said SquareOne partner Georg Stockinger in a statement. “As LLMs (large language models) conquer the world with surging infrastructure demands and Moore’s Law approaches its physical limits, the huge bottleneck of computing resources will shape the future. Semron will be a key factor in solving this problem by delivering a revolutionary new chip specifically designed for computing AI models. It breaks the traditional transistor-based computing paradigm and will reduce cost and energy consumption by at least 20 times for a given computing task.”
With the new funding, Semron plans to step up hardware and compiler development, expand its team, and focus on internationalization. The company aims to quadruple its team by the end of the year.
Semron is targeting the edge device market with strong AI needs, such as digital assistants or video processing in smartphones, voice control and real-time translation in headphones, and LLMs/GenAI in VR headsets. To date, the company has raised $10.9 million and has 11 employees.