Ascatron raises funding from Italian venture capitalists
Ascatron, a Swedish company developing next generation SiC power semiconductors, has signed an investment agreement with the Italian investors Quadrivio (through its venture capital fund TTVenture) and Como Venture.
Under the agreement, Quadrivio and Como Venture together received 16.7 percent share in Ascatron. Their aim is to continue to actively support Ascatron in order to create a leading industrial group for next generation power semiconductors based on wide bandgap materials such as (SiC) and GaN. The market is growing rapidly with an annual growth rate of 54 percent to reach $2.0B in 2020.
"This is a first investment from international investors in Ascatron and we are very pleased to having Quadrivio and Como Venture taking lead on our current A-round fund raising", says Christian Vieider, CEO of Ascatron. "The money will be used to bring the Buried Grid technology for next generation high performance SiC Power electronic devices to the market".
As part of the agreement Ascatron aquired 28.8 percent of the shares in PileGrowth Tech, an Italian start-up company based in Milan. Pilegrowth has developed an innovative process for growing different semiconductor materials such as SiC on silicon. The material technology enable Ascatron to also address volume consumer markets with very competitive devices.
"The development of MOSFET transistors based on cubic SiC grown on silicon is an exciting challenge with potential to compete in the 300-1000V market with other semiconductors such as GaN", according to Adolf Schöner, CTO of Ascatron.
With its 3DSiC technology Ascatron provides the active doping structure based on epitaxy, which it says enables material quality and device performance unattainable through current methods.
Ascatron fabricates epitaxial material in-house and outsources processing of device wafers and chip packaging. Prototype fabrication is done in the Electrum Laboratory in Kista-Stockholm. Target applications range from high temperature for harsh environment to high voltage for wind, traction and datacentres, as well as volume markets for solar and automotive.
Ascatron started the operation in 2011 as a spin-out from the research institute Acreo, and has ten employees in Sweden.
