Atum Works豪赌3D纳米光刻，而非继续缩小，以延长芯片路线图

做的是什么生意

A semiconductor manufacturing technology startup building 3D lithography that fabricates multi-material 3D structures at 100nm resolution at wafer scale — a '3D ASML' for the era after planar scaling.

启动资金：YC standard $500K pre-seed (Spring 2025).

起因

Founded in 2024 by a team of physicists and systems engineers from Caltech and NASA — winners of NASA's Most Visionary Concept and Best Product Development awards — Atum Works built on an industry concern voiced by TSMC Chief Scientist H.-S. Philip Wong: after 50 years of shrinking the transistor, the road ahead has reached the end of the tunnel. Stacking 2D layers scales cost exponentially — a 10-layer HBM package costs about 5x more than the same amount of unstacked DRAM — so the company proposed true 3D lithography instead and entered YC's Spring 2025 batch.

经过

In April 2025 Atum Works publicly demonstrated its approach — fabricating multi-material 3D structures with 100nm resolution at wafer scale, claiming roughly one-tenth the cost of today's 2D lithography. By YC's Spring 2025 Demo Day (June 2025), TechCrunch reported investors calling the vision so revolutionary that the company 'has a chance to become the next Nvidia.' The YC directory page states the team has crossed cost thresholds that make the technology commercially viable, and lists an advisory board including TSMC Chief Scientist H.-S. Philip Wong, Intel Fellow Pooya Tadayon, Caltech's Julia Greer and silicon-photonics pioneer Michael Hochberg.

结果

Still active and building: as of 2026 the company remains in R&D, saying it will drive an exponential scaling law in production capacity over the coming decade toward commercial nanomanufacturing.

可借鉴之处

当行业核心技术停滞时，胜出的赌注是改变制造维度，而不是改进现有工具——去旧工艺无法跟随的地方。