"Tungsten Iridium Electronics" Completes Million-Level Angel Round Financing, Focusing on the Localization Replacement of Semiconductor Heat Sink Materials | HardcoreTech First Release

Author｜Huang Nan

Editor｜Yuan Silai

Hardcore Capital has learned that Tungsten-Iridium Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tungsten-Iridium Electronics") recently completed a several-million-yuan angel round of financing. The investor is Yuhua Capital, and the financing funds will be used to accelerate the research and development progress of new products and improve the delivery capacity of mass-produced products.

Tungsten-Iridium Electronics was established in June 2023. With semiconductor process technology as the core support, it focuses on the research of micro-macro integrated heat dissipation simulation technology and low interface thermal resistance technology and the production of related products. The company is headquartered in Dalian, with a research and development center in Suzhou and a production base in Shijiazhuang, forming an IDM model integrating research and development, production, and sales. Its self-built semiconductor clean workshop covers an area of 1,000 square meters, with different functional areas such as class 100, class 1,000, and class 10,000, belonging to an advanced domestic semiconductor thin film product production line.

Process Equipment

According to product types, heat sink wafers mainly include several major categories such as metal heat sinks, ceramic heat sinks, and diamond heat sinks. Among them, ceramic heat sink wafers, as the largest subdivision type, have a market share of approximately 54%. With the rapid development of 5G, the Internet of Things, AI technology, etc. in recent years, the demand for heat sink wafers in electronic products has grown rapidly. The innovation and improvement of heat sink manufacturing technology can meet the increasingly high requirements of the downstream market for heat dissipation performance.

According to data from institutions such as QYResearch, the global heat sink wafer market has shown a steady growth trend in the past few years. The market size was approximately 300 million US dollars in 2023, and it is expected to reach 370 million US dollars in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate between 3.3% and 3.4%.

However, for a long time, AIN (aluminum nitride) as an important heat sink material has been monopolized by the core powder industry chain in Japan. With the arrival of the application limit and the increasingly fierce price war, the domestic substitution of a new generation of materials and heat sink technologies represented by SiC (silicon carbide) has become a key issue.

SiC Heat Sink

As an enterprise focused on the research and development of the third-generation SiC heat sink technology, Tungsten-Iridium Electronics has launched four product series: ceramic carriers, prefabricated solder heat sinks, ceramic covers, and thin-film passive integration. Xu Huiwu, the founder, told Hardcore Capital that by directly replacing AIN materials with SiC, the thermal resistance of high-power devices can be reduced by more than 10%.

Hardcore Capital understands that the current domesticization of heat sink materials in the industry mainly focuses on two aspects: one is the replaceability of product performance, including appearance, size, and heat dissipation capacity. The material linear expansion coefficient or comprehensive linear expansion coefficient must be close to that of the chip; the other is the stability of the core cost.

Xu Huiwu explained, "Currently, most customers can accept a 10% cost increase, coupled with a power increase of about 10% or more for the device. After using the SiC substitution material, the cost expenditure of the enterprise will not increase significantly but will be relatively stable."

Product Inspection

In terms of the implementation stage, the cycle from research and development to mass production of a new product of Tungsten-Iridium Electronics is usually 6 to 9 months, including design, process development, the testing of detectable parameters of samples within the enterprise, and the performance testing and reliability verification of more than 500 hours that the customer needs to conduct after obtaining the samples. The one-time pass rate of its samples is often above 90%.

Currently, Tungsten-Iridium Electronics has built a full-process research and development and production workshop from cleaning, lithography, coating, DPC process, dicing to inspection, targeting leading customers in the fields of industrial laser processing, laser display projection, optical communication, etc. Based on the cases and long-term verification effects of industry-leading customers, it drives the development of medium-sized customer enterprises and market growth.

Xu Huiwu said, "With the development of new-quality productive forces and the upgrading of traditional industries, the demand for upstream core components, including heat sink wafers, is very strong. Taking the laser display track as an example, Hisense's penetration speed is very fast. The price drop of this laser projection equipment also drives the rapid increase in sales data. It can be said that 2024 is the outbreak year of laser display projection. This is also an opportunity for development for enterprises like our Tungsten-Iridium Electronics that focus on core heat dissipation technology."

In the future, Tungsten-Iridium Electronics will continue to focus on the optoelectronics subdivision field, centering on scenarios such as cutting and welding, laser display, lidar, optical communication, etc., and based on independent intellectual property rights and technological innovation capabilities, accelerate the realization of the domestic substitution of the third-generation SiC heat sink solution.