Silicon Catalyst at Global Semiconductor Alliance’s 2024 International Semiconductor Conference in London

Silicon Catalyst sponsored the GSA International Conference held in London on March 13th and 14th. This was the first time an international semiconductor conference was held in the UK for close to a decade.

Having reinvigorated the appetite for semiconductor startups in the UK, our regional Silicon Catalyst events have been regularly attracting over 100 attendees. The ChipStart UK launch in October ’23 hosted 150 attendees. The GSA ambition was to reach an audience of 250. With less than a month to the event, the registration had not exceeded 40. Using our Silicon Catalyst branding with a doppalganger Lord Kitchener, we projected the message that your UK semiconductor industry needs you to get involved in this international debate about the future path of global semiconductors. With this call to action, we successfully accelerated registrations to well above the required target with the final number being 320 tickets.

The compelling content of the conference was kicked off with a GSA Women Leadership Initiative session addressed by their wonderful CEO Jodie Shelton. Our very own Maria Cristina Borelli is actively involved in this brilliant initiative representing Silicon Catalyst in Europe. A powerful keynote address was delivered by Francoise Chombar, founder and Chairwoman of one of Europe’s up and coming semiconductor companies, Melexis.

Silicon Catalyst featured prominently in the two-day agenda, with our Strategic Partner, Arm, launching the joint semiconductor startup competition that we are running together for the second year in a row. The lucky winner will receive $250k of Arm credits plus unique networking opportunities and significant marketing exposure.

Our co-founder and board member, Dan Armbrust chaired a thoughtful and well-informed panel discussion on semiconductor policy interventions from the US Chips Act and comparing and contrasting strategies from the EU Chips Act and UK semiconductor strategy.

The final afternoon of the second day was devoted entirely to semiconductor startups.

Our UK Managing Partner, Sean Redmond introduced the ever-growing Silicon Catalyst ecosystem to lead into a showcase of SiliconCatalyst.UK early stage semiconductor startups from the 9 month UK Government funded ChipStart UK incubator. Each startup projected their value for 5 minutes in fast succession, convincingly and professionally making their case for seed investment.

Below is a list of the promising semiconductor startups who represented the first cohort of ChipStart UK.

• Blueshift Memory – new memory architecture accelerating compute and reducing energy consumption, overcoming the Von Neumann bottleneck

• Finchetto – developing the world’s first entirely passive, packet aware, network switch for telecoms, data centres, and high-performance compute users to significantly improve performance and lower energy consumption

• HIDRA Vision – 100x faster, 100% wafer inspection for compound semiconductor device fabrication

• HyperCIM – unifying compute and memory with a 100% enterprise software compatible low-power processor in memory

• Literal Labs – 10,000x lower energy and 1,000x faster inferencing through propositional logic and Tsetlin machines

• MintNeuro – empowering next-generation neural implants with advanced semiconductor technology

• RED Semiconductor – reducing power and improving security with Vector Instruction Set Computing

• SECQAI – securing computation and communication to protect you from the threats of today and tomorrow

• Singular Photonics – developing next generation high performance SPAD sensors and cameras for scientific, medical and wearable applications

• Vaire – developing near-zero energy chips with reversible computing

• Wave Photonics – enabling rapid development for integrated photonic products.

 SiliconCatalyst.UK Management Team

SILICON STARTUP SOLUTIONS

A JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY SILICONCATALYST.UK