Printing high-performance semiconductors on a wide range of substrates – just imagine the possibilities. Turns out, startup Semprius Inc. , which was spun out from the University of Illinois research labs but is now located in Durham, North Caroline, has taken major steps in making this a reality. As a matter of fact, the company’s progress has been so encouraging that quite some money has been flowing their way as of late. At the end of April, Semprius received $4.1 million in Series A funding from Arch Venture Partners and Intersouth Partners - both firms have quite a bit of experience in funding semiconductor startups. Additionally, just a few days ago the National Science Foundation awarded the company a grant to pursue research in processes and materials for the display industry. Key to Semprius’ success so far is the elegant method that the company is proposing for transferring transistors from a traditional substrate onto other surfaces such as glass or plastic. In short, the transistors are manufactured on a traditional and well understood substrate, leveraging conventional manufacturing techniques, thus eliminating any problems that would be introduced using non-traditional substrates. The innovation stems from the company’s ability to then peel off the finished transistor from the traditional substrate and place it onto another one. A more detailed illustration of the process can be found here. One sample application for this technology would be placing transistors directly onto an LCD back panel, which would lead to significantly faster pixel response times for the display. Other applications include: flexible displays, large area sensors, RF devices, and OLEDs. With all these interesting business opportunities looming on the horizon for the company, it will be interesting to watch whether or not Semprius will be successful at commercializing their technology.

It is hard to stay on top of news in most industries. Thus it is nice when one comes across a site that pulls a lot of information from different sources and presents them in a nice and readable format. Case in point is SemiTrends.com, a nicely laid out news aggregator of semiconductor related news. It does look like the news is posted manually, but don’t worry, the site is updated several times a day and always contains plenty of reading material. Actually, some of the manual filtering might be of value, eliminating articles that have marginal content. All posts are tagged, allowing you to click on a tag and read posts that have been tagged similarly. One can also browse the posts by categories; however, the number of categories is simply staggering, and thus hard to navigate. The authors of the site might want to consider some alphabetical binning, especially when it comes to company names. The search functionality is located below all the categories – just in case you had a hard time finding it. Overall though, it is a great site, and definitely beats surfing from one site to another to get your daily fill of semiconductor news.

EETimes.com has a fairly entertaining and interesting read titled “How to keep engineers happy.” Why is it entertaining? For one, while some of the quotes seem right on, a few are questionable at best and a few others promote old and mostly ineffective management doctrines. Take, for example, the following quote by Andrew Iserson that is mentioned in the article: “Most workers would rather not change jobs,” unless influenced by external factors. A terrible generalization by any means, but especially inaccurate when applied to younger workers that have graduated in the last ten years or so. Most young engineers that I have encountered in my career don’t see any problems changing companies. As a matter of fact, the majority views changing companies as one of the best ways to obtain a significant salary boost, gain new skills as well as experience, and to broaden their professional network. This is especially true for engineers that are not tied down by families or are located in booming economies.  Furthermore, many younger engineers have witnessed major semiconductor companies cut down on pension plans and other benefits, at a time when startup companies in related fields such as computer-science and bio-engineering were luring workers with significant perks, thus further decreasing employee loyalty. This leads directly to one of the major points that the article fails to address: nobody wants to work for a “cheap” company. There is a proper time and place for cost-cutting, but if a company’s major plan for increasing profits is cost-cutting of office supplies and coffee stirrers, and not a good strategic roadmap for future products, the company should really not be surprised if their top talent decides to jump ship. Anyhow, be sure to check out the charts that accompany the article as well, since they yield some interesting information about general hiring practices.