Behind Inpria’s Record-Breaking Sale
Eric Rosenfeld – July 2022
Moore’s Law – where the number of transistors in an integrated circuit roughly doubles every 2 years and which has governed the semiconductor industry’s march of progress since the 1970s – was about to hit a brick wall. The lack of a photoresist – a photo-reactive ink – to work with next-gen extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, meant that engineers could no longer develop chips with increasingly smaller transistors.
The electronics and semiconductor industry was so concerned that when Inpria spun out of Oregon State University, the leading chip making companies all invested – Intel, Samsung, TSMC, JSR, ASML, and Applied Materials, to name a few. The Oregon Venture Fund invested, as well, leaning on the semiconductor lithography technical and industry expertise of several OVF venture partners.
Inpria went on to raise over $70 million to fuel its effort to crack the nut of how to produce an ink that when paired with EUV light could produce circuits with the line width of a billionth of a meter. The team grew to 50 scientists and engineers and moved into a lab at OSU’s Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute. They soon cracked the nut and, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Moore’s Law’s death were greatly exaggerated. Late last year, Inpria was purchased by JSR for a whopping $514 million.
Thanks to Inpria and the next generation of ICs they will enable, cell phones and electric vehicles will continue to benefit from longer battery life, the internet will continue to get faster, and AI/ML will continue to become more powerful.
The $514 million exit is momentous for OSU and Corvallis: it’s the largest payment for an Oregon-grown advanced materials company and for an OSU spinout.
A case can be made that a company like Inpria could launch and achieve such success only in Oregon...
Inpria benefitted tremendously from the resident expertise in photolithography at Intel and its significant local concentration of global suppliers, including JSR.
Inpria's original innovations and key scientists trace to OSU's world-class chemistry department, led by distinguished professor Doug Keszler.
Dr. Keszler and his graduate students have benefitted over the years from deep relationships and support from locally based advanced materials, electronics, and microfluidics companies, especially HP.
HP has a 55-year history of close collaboration with and support of OSU. At its peak, HP employed over 10,000 in Corvallis, many were OSU grads.
Over the years, OSU faculty and students have contributed significantly to HP's research, development, and manufacturing of the personal calculator, the personal computer, liquid-crystal displays, and the microfluidics underlying the inkjet printer.
No other location would have had the ingredients necessary for Inpria’s innovations and success, including their Corvallis-based leadership team of Andrew Grenville, a former Intel lithography engineer and Ann Carney Nelson, a former Sr. Associate with Menlo Ventures. We admire and appreciate all they and their team have accomplished and the industry-changing impact of their hard work. In their honor, we offer a sonnet of gratitude…
Sonnet 514
Shall I compare thee to a gate array?
Thou art more lovely and more intricate
Rough line edges are a problem today
And photoresist can’t make them straight.
Along comes Andrew Grenville the alchemist
And Ann Carney Nelson who optimizes
Inpria’s metal oxide photoresist
For very small pitches and feature sizes.
Gordon Moore’s Eternal Law shall not fade
Nor cease to apply to electronics
Apple can continue to sell an upgrade
Thanks to the magic of EUV photonics
To Intel, Nvidia, and TSMC
To Moore’s Law, Inpria gives more life to thee.