PragmatIC Semiconductor secures $80m in new funding

PragmatIC Semiconductor, a specialist in flexible electronics, has announced that it has secured $80 million of Series C funding.

The company said that the investment will be used to build a second FlexLogIC fab in the North East of England, to meet the growing demand for ultra-low-cost flexible integrated circuits (FlexICs) for the Internet of Everything.

“This successful Series C round is a testament to the potential for our technology to enable trillions of smart items and address key UN sustainable development goals,” said Scott White, CEO of PragmatIC Semiconductor. “Our FlexLogIC-002 fab will deliver significantly higher capacity than our first line, whilst still maintaining our signature ultra-low capex, fast production cycle time and minimal carbon footprint. In addition to supporting our continued commercial ramp, it provides a template for rolling out a distributed global network of FlexLogIC systems, offering a Fab-as-a-Service (FaaS) for dedicated production on major customer sites to enable efficient and secure semiconductor supply chains.”

Over the past few years PragmatIC has launched its flagship ConnectIC product line of ultra-low-cost RFID FlexICs, as well as its FlexIC Foundry service enabling designers to create more pioneering products and advance them rapidly from concept to reality.

This year it has demonstrated an order-of-magnitude improvement in complexity and compute capability for non-silicon chips by producing flexible microprocessors. These include the iconic 6502 and PlasticArm, an ultra-minimalist Arm Cortex-M0 based system-on-a-chip which is 12 times more complex than previous state-of-the-art flexible electronics.

PlasticArm is the result of many years of collaboration between the two companies, and Arm participated in this funding round.

“Billions of everyday objects could benefit from being part of the Internet of Things, but to continue to scale sustainably we need to explore new approaches for embedding intelligence into everyday objects,” said Dipesh Patel, chief technology officer at Arm. “Flexible electronics can extend the range and scope of what is possible today and we see massive potential for it to be creatively adopted by the Arm ecosystem, leading to innovation with global impact.”