There's a certain sameness to spaces meant for tech startups: flexible cubicle arrangements, glass-encased executive offices, whiteboard walls awaiting equations and ideas, basement laboratories for the noisier and more dangerous parts of the process. In some ways the home of Ideal Semiconductor on the campus of Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Penn., is just like that. The most noticeable difference is a life-size statue of 18th-century inventor and electricity enthusiast Benjamin Franklin seated on the bench outside.

Ideal cofounder and CEO Mark Granahan admits to having had a quiet moment or two with ole Benny Kite-and-Key, but it takes a lot more than inspiration from a founder of your home country to turn a clever idea into a valuable semiconductor company. Navigating from lightbulb moment to laboratory demo and finally to manufactured reality has always been the defining struggle of hardware startups. But Ideal's journey is particularly illustrative of the state of invention in the U.S. semiconductor industry today and, in particular, how the CHIPS and Science Act, a law the startup's founders personally and exhaustively advocated for, might change things for the better.

That law, passed in 2022, is best known for pumping tens of billions of dollars into the construction of new leading-edge CMOS fabs in the United States, a country that had exactly zero such facilities at the time. But there's another side to the effort, one that's intended to speed the critical lab-to-fab process for new technologies and lead to more and better semiconductor-based inventions that can be manufactured (mostly) in the United States.

And it's this side that Ideal's founders think will make the biggest difference for semiconductor startups. How big? While the CHIPS Act comes for the most part too late for Ideal's first product, its executives think that if the law had been around and implemented, the company's seven-year journey to a marketed product would have been done in…

Samuel K. Moore

Read full article