Lamina Ceramics, Inc., a Princeton, N.J.-based company that uses proprietary technology to bond unfired ceramic to metal for use in communications and electronic components and packaging, announced today that it has obtained $12 million in venture-capital funding.
The funding comes from Morgenthaler, a national venture capital firm with many investments in wireless and optical communications, as well as from an unnamed major communications systems vendor. Sarnoff Corp., the technology development firm that invented the bonding process, is also a major equity partner in Lamina, officials said.
Taylor Adair, Lamina's chief executive officer (CEO), calls the company's technology "a Swiss army knife for solving next generation electrical and mechanical design problems." Bonded-ceramic-on-metal, he says, offers component and packaging customers a multifaceted tool that helps them significantly reduce size, lower system costs, and greatly improve performance.
The advantages provided by Lamina's technology are especially significant in high power and high frequency applications, Adair said. "We believe that bonded ceramic-on-metal will become the material of choice for a huge number of next generation packages and components where electrical and thermal performance are important." These include all optical and microwave transmitter circuits where heat must be efficiently dissipated and all devices operating at or above 2 Gigahertz for wireless and 10 Gigabits for optical, he says.
"Our multi-layer ceramic-on-metal technology also allows us to build packages and components featuring low signal loss, high circuit density, and high flexural strength, among other advantages," he also said.
Lamina said its technology represents a major improvement over the Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramics (LTCC) technology that has gained wide acceptance over the past three years in such applications as disk drives and wireless components. Lamina's upgraded material, Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramics on Metal (LTCC-M), is the product of a decade of development at Sarnoff. By pre-bonding ceramic to metal, Lamina technology allows design engineers to make components and packages that much more quickly issipate heat than LTCC and that can be produced in sizes from a fraction of an inch up to 10 inches.
LTCC-M-based parts exhibit virtually no co-efficient of expansion in the x and y axes, thus providing design engineers consistently predictable electrical properties, officials added.
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