David Lazovsky, founder, president and CEO of Intermolecular Inc., started the company after having an epiphany in 2004. Lazovsky worked at a blue-chip technology company developing new semiconductor manufacturing techniques. He soon came to understand that there were inefficiencies in the methods being used to solve customer technical problems.
Trying to use high-volume production equipment to explore and refine advanced microelectronic circuits didn’t work. Lazovsky left and began a quest to find a proper solution to the advanced semiconductor device development problem.
Over a few months, he met with researchers and companies working in the materials discovery space and had an epiphany. He realized that the problem was an industrywide R&D problem of being able to take materials from concept to validation. The people he spoke with had technology for innovative, high-speed materials discovery, but they didn’t understand the challenges that chipmakers were facing, but he did.
Lazovsky quickly went to work on a business plan, got investors and started Intermolecular Inc. with combinatorial research technology that enabled dozens of experiments to be performed in parallel, accelerating the R&D process.
Instead of the traditional hardware-oriented model of selling process tools and including expertise for free, Lazovsky’s company enters into collaborative development programs with customers, providing access to hardware, software for data management and analysis, as well as a team of in-house experts in key disciplines. This infrastructure allows the company and its customers to find and refine new materials, device architectures, processes and prepare them for manufacturing insertion with extreme speed.
The company’s innovative platform had tremendous appeal. It can accelerate the R&D process by orders of magnitude, allowing technologies to move from the conceptual stage to production in just a few months rather than years.
Lazovsky has convinced one person at a time that his company’s service works. His company has won contracts, including licensing and royalty agreements, with multiple major chipmakers and leading materials companies. The company’s customers include device manufacturers, materials suppliers and equipment manufacturers in the semiconductor and clean energy industries.
HOW TO REACH: Intermolecular, (408) 582-5410 or www.intermolecular.com
