SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP278: Details of This Year’s Semiconductor Startups Contest with Silicon Catalyst’s Nick Kepler

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Dan is joined by Nick Kepler, COO and Director at Silicon Catalyst. Nick has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, with varied leadership and technology management roles including semiconductor process technology development and manufacturing, design enablement, technical program management, and … Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nennie, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Nick Kepler. He has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry with varied leadership and technology management roles, including semiconductor process technology development and manufacturing, design enablement, technical program management, and customer facing marketing and technical sales. Welcome to the podcast, Nick. Thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been an avid reader

of SemiWiki for many years, and it's nice to be on your podcast. Oh, thank you for saying. So the first question is, what got you started in semiconductors? You know, I noticed you were at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s, a very exciting time. What pointed you over towards the semiconductor industry? Well, UC Berkeley's engineering program combines electrical engineering and computer science. And I had graduated from high school and gone off to Berkeley to get a computer science degree. And so I was in the EECS program as a computer science person. But I found over my first couple of years of college that I didn't find computer science

all that interesting. I didn't find the programming all that interesting. I didn't find the programming aspects to be all that exciting. And I was really intrigued by the electrical engineering that I took. So I took advantage of the fact that within one major, I could shift horses. And I did that and started to focus

on the electrical engineering aspects. And in particular, the device physics class, I found just fascinating the way the whole, what happened within the silicon. And I also found it really challenging and I guess I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment. And so I kind of went down the path that I found the most difficult to understand

and succeed at. And the next thing I knew, I was developing process technologies at AMD. Yeah, that must have been an exciting time to be at AMD. Yes. Yes, it was. You know, AMD was making the transition from bipolar to CMOS in my first years there. We were also going through a kind of wrenching transition along with the rest of the industry. I joined in early 1986 and 1985, 86, 87 were quite a downturn.

AMD chose to get a DRAMs in my first year at the company and shut down that fab and laid off those employees. And the CMOS logic team that I was on was very, very small. And we were really working in the corner of the DRAM fab. So our fab was suddenly shut down and 90% of the people that I had met in my first six months out of college lost their jobs. And yeah, that was a real eye opening entry to industry. Um, but yeah, AMD made a lot of good choices, got itself positioned well with a slimmed down portfolio and, uh, went on to compete quite

successfully with Intel for microprocessors. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I went through school at the same time you did and I did the same thing. I started out in computer science and I fell in love with electrical engineering and so I double majored because we didn't have a combined degree. And but when I got out of college in the mid 8080s, most of the jobs were hardware anyway, so it was a good choice.

So what brought you to Silicon Catalyst? I joined Silicon Catalyst right at the start. And at the time, I wasn't working. I'd been at a startup that had failed, as so many startups do. After spending many years at AMD and then also some time at Global Foundries as part of the spin out from AMD, and I came to the Silicon Catalyst launch event at Avaya Stadium because I knew Dan Armbrust who had been an executive at IBM when AMD and IBM were partnered. Dan and I had worked together for several years. He was the initial CEO of Silicon Catalyst. So I came to this event. Dan and I chatted.

We had lunch the next week and he asked me to get involved. And I just thought it looked like a really interesting thing and a worthwhile thing to do. Interesting because it was still part of the semiconductor industry and therefore adjacent to what I had spent the last 25-30 years doing, but also really interesting because it was different than what I had done. And it was related to the startup world that I had just been part of and I very much could understand the challenges that Silicon Catalyst was trying to address because I'd been at a startup that had those challenges. I also thought it looked like a worthwhile thing to do,

because like Dan and most of the other people that have joined the Silicon Catalyst team and really our ecosystem of advisors, it was an opportunity to give back to the industry that has helped us so much to live the lives that we have lived and grow our careers by helping the next generation of entrepreneurs develop innovative semiconductor technologies.

Yeah, I agree completely. I was at that event as a matter of fact, I've been working with Sylwep and Kialis since the beginning and it's been a great experience. So let's talk about the upcoming contest. This is the third one. How did it get started? Well ARM joined us

formally in 2020 about five years ago and they became both a strategic partner to silicon catalyst and an in kind partner within our ecosystem our strategic partners look to us to help them scout technology innovation and understand what is coming in the industry so that they can target what they are doing to meet new businesses where they're going. Our in-kind partners provide tools and services

that help our startups grow. And it's both a way of helping the industry and a way of developing their next set of customers. We also, in the case of each of our strategic partners, work with them on a strategic initiative that is important to them. And in the case of Arm, that involved helping them engage effectively with startups.

Arm is a major company. They are the largest and most successful IP company in the industry. They have a reputation of having terrific IP that everybody wants to use, but they also recognize that they were perceived as being too expensive and difficult to work with for a startup. And they wanted to work with startups, they didn't think they were difficult to work with, but they needed to get that message out. We can do that because we have such a good connection with startups and such a terrific ecosystem.

So, they looked for us to help them get their message and connect with startups. And that's what the contest is all about. It's about identifying startups that would like to use ARM IP and then getting them connected with ARM. Yeah, exactly. It's a great program. So can you describe the winning companies in 2023 and 2024? Just as an example. Sure. The company that won the contest in our first year in 2023 is Equal One. Equal One is based in Ireland. They are working on quantum computing, which is one of the next big things in the semiconductor industry.

And they want to include ARM technology as part of their control system. Last year, the winner was another European company called Agate Sensors, spinning out of a university in Finland. They're targeting the hyperspectral imaging market. And again, they wanted to use RMIP to enable their technology breakthrough.

Right. I remember there was quite a few of these companies were spun out of universities. That's an excellent opportunity. What does the contest offer to startups? What are the prizes this year in 2025? offer to startups? You know, what are the prizes this year in 2025? The prizes, first and foremost,

are to receive technology credit from Arm worth $250,000, a quarter of a million dollars for the winner and $150,000 for the runner up. But in addition, the winner of the company also gets to have access to Arm Flexible Access, which is a program Arm put together specifically to allow a more flexible way of customers for engaging with Arm. And that's a particularly appropriate program for startups.

It's an amazing program, actually. It is a more attractive program for startups than what I had originally asked Arm to provide to our ecosystem as an in-kind partner. It is first of all, at no cost to startups, which is of course important. It gives them the ability to play with different Arm IP before they decide which part, which IP they wanna use in their design.

That's not the normal way the IP industry works. You normally need to license the IP, pay the money, and then start to implement it in your design. And if you find out it's the wrong IP, well, you've already licensed it. And flexible access doesn't require that. You can try different IP to find the right one. It also provides not just verified high quality IP where ARM leads the industry, but it provides

the tools and the training and the support to implement that IP successfully in your chip and then provide the best product to your customers. We also consider all of the applicants to the ARM contest for admission to Silicon Catalyst. So we do a review of the pitches. We provide an opportunity for those companies to pitch to the groups that are associated with us that do investments, the Silicon Catalyst Angels and the Silicon Catalyst Ventures. That's a good opportunity for those companies to both raise investment dollars and also sharpen their story by by dealing with investors

who are willing to give them feedback on what they're doing. Yeah, absolutely. What are the benefits offered by the Arm flexible access for startups? Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure, you know one of the things that that startups feel is that it's going to be too difficult to deal with Arm because they're a really large company and they must have a horde of lawyers and really complicated contracts. One of the things Arm has done with flexible access is they have greatly simplified the contractual aspects of dealing with Arm.

It's a very streamlined contract to join flexible access. In addition, by providing such flexible access to all of their IP that is part of flexible access, companies can come in, they can look over the IP and they can decide which things they want to use, which IP is appropriate for their product before they need to make a decision and go into production. And they don't pay for any of this until they go into production.

So the deferral of cost until production is a really big deal, as well as the idea that the companies end up going to production with ARM IP in their products, which is the most well-received IP in the industry. It has the biggest software ecosystem around. It fits into customers' systems the best. You know, I guess the big question is,

what are the eligibility requirements to enter the contest? So the eligibility requirements are pretty simple. It has to be a silicon-based startup company with a maximum fundraising of $20 million, as well as no more than a million dollars of revenue per year and all companies that meet those requirements are welcome to apply for the contest. The contest is launching today March 17th. What is the deadline to enter the contest? So we've got the window open for about a month.

Companies can apply anywhere from when we when we launch on March 17th on St. Patrick's Day through Friday, April 25th. And we will take all of those applications. We'll be doing a review of them with executives from both ARM and Silicon Catalyst. And then we will be choosing a winner and announcing that winner at the Silicon Catalyst Spring Portfolio Company update, which will be on May 15th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. And how does a startup apply to enter the contest? A startup that wants to enter the contest simply needs to go to the Silicon Catalyst webpage and click on the button to fill out the contest application and we just need a simple

application filled out as well as a two to three minute elevator pitch video submitted for the contest. Great. We'll put a link in the podcast introduction as well and thank you for your time Nick. Looking forward to seeing you at the next Silicon Catalyst event. You're welcome, Dan. Thanks for hosting this discussion and I look forward to seeing you also. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.