Pausing thermal interface materials for bigger markets
From 20 Years of R&D. Matched in 3 Months by 2 Friends. on Deeptech Decoded, with Advaith Sridhar.
Transcript
Yeah, yeah. feel like particularly in this field, the material you go after really matters because each of these has a really long sales cycle. There's all this qualification that needs to happen. if you go after a domain where it's possible for people to reverse engineer what your material is and the process wasn't that hard, then you could lose all the advantage that you've built in finding it.
So the starting points really matter. Particularly, we did all this work on thermal interface materials. But I don't think it's the right path for us to go after, because two reasons. One is.
the market for these stims is around a billion dollars today.
But that's not that much no matter what material we go after, the probability of success is around the same and it's low. And so you want to ensure you maximize the other term, which is the size of the market that you're going after. so,
Mm.
which is why we were like, hey, we are making good progress on these stims, but maybe we should reangle ourselves to materials that people will care more about than they do about the packaging layer.
So we're actually pausing all our work
Mm.
on these TIMS right now, but still on this track of thermal materials. We still believe that thermals is going to be what drives the future of chips. However, we don't think TIMS is necessarily the best way to get there. And so we are readjusting ourselves right now on that.
so then actually my initial my previous question kinda made sense because I was trying to understand how are you gonna go get from the TIMs to semiconductors. I think it served you well.
Because then you got to demonstrate your capability, understanding, and how fast you can execute. Because literally you have milestones during the six specs, first six specs, and those those are not easy. you immediately could f put yourself on a comparison with the big heavy players on a chart where everyone would like to be in that sweet spot.
Yeah,
yeah, 100%. As I said before, with many things in semiconductors, you need to have the fab or some version of expensive instruments to get started.
