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Micron’s strategic investment in Silvaco: accelerating Advanced Modeling-based solutions and innovations

Manish Tangri, Dr. Gurtej Sandhu | April 2024

As a global semiconductor company, Micron is uniquely positioned to bring strategic value to companies through Micron Ventures investments in a variety of ways:

  • R&D support — help build a next-gen business
  • Productization — grow with our industry experts
  • Collaborative market entry — access to our ecosystem

A great example is Micron’s recent $5M convertible note investment in Silvaco, a provider of technology computer aided design software, electronic design automation software and semiconductor intellectual property, or TCAD, EDA and SIP, respectively.

Silvaco is combining their expertise in semiconductor technologies with machine learning and data analysis to develop an artificial intelligence-based solution named Fab Technology Co-Optimization, or FTCO™, for wafer-level fabrication facilities. FTCO enables customers to use their manufacturing data to perform statistical and physics-based machine learning software simulations to create a computer model or “digital twin” of a wafer that can be used to simulate the fabrication process. As a virtual representation of the manufacturing process and the wafer, this “digital twin” then serves as a platform through which a customer can run experiments and tests to understand the impact on the yield of a wafer due to variations in the parameters of the manufacturing process, predict the yield for further research on new products, and reduce the time to market for products, all without the need to run physical wafers, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

Silvaco’s advanced modeling solutions are enabling us to accelerate our groundbreaking advancements in memory and storage. Our ability to add strategic value to Silvaco is what makes this a great investment for both companies.

Director, Corporate Development

Manish Tangri

Manish Tangri is director of corporate development at Micron, and is based in San Jose, CA. He leads inorganic strategy and execution of strategic transactions — mergers and acquisitions, equity investments, and partnerships — worldwide. Previously, he spent more than fifteen years executing entrepreneurial innovation and growth activities at Fortune 500 companies such as Intel and Microsoft. His experiences include recognizing external trends and nonlinear shifts and amplifying them so organizations can create their future. An expert in business model innovation in established companies, Manish is the co-author of the Harvard Business Review Press book — The Three-Box Solution Playbook: Tools and Tactics for Creating Your Company’s Strategy. As adjunct, at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, Manish taught a self-developed course on accelerating innovation, for more than five years. He has an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Principal Fellow and Vice President, Technology Pathfinding

Dr. Gurtej Sandhu

Gurtej Sandhu is Principal Fellow and Vice President, Technology Pathfinding at Micron Technology. In his current role, he is responsible for Micron’s end-to-end (Si-to-Package) R&D technology roadmaps. The scope includes driving cross-functional alignment across various departments and business units to proactively identify technology gaps, and managing the engineering organization to resource and execute on developing innovative technology solutions for future memory scaling. Dr. Sandhu’s responsibilities include leading several internal project teams worldwide and managing interactions with research consortia around the world. At Micron, Dr. Sandhu has held several engineering and management roles. He has been actively involved with a broad range of process technologies for IC processing and has pioneered several process technologies currently employed in mainstream semiconductor chip manufacturing. Dr. Sandhu received a degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and a Ph.D. in physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1990. He holds over 1,300 U.S. patents and is recognized as one of the top inventors in the world. Dr. Sandhu is a Fellow of IEEE. In 2018, he received the IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award for outstanding contributions to silicon CMOS process technology that enables DRAM and NAND memory chip scaling.