February 13, 2015 // Julien Happich

Although PragmatIC Printing's CEO Scott White would not reveal to what extent ARM Holdings invested in his company (which was initially funded by the companys management together with private investors), the extra GBP 5.4 million funding round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) together with existing shareholders does not give any exclusive control to ARM.

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It is simply a way for ARM to steer some of our activities and give some meaningful and useful input to the business, helping guide what we do.

When asked if ARM could come up with specific IP to leverage PragmatIC Printings process design rules for flexible electronics, White didnt want to speculate.

We are broadening our circuit design activities on several fronts, from re-using standard circuit architectures to developing new functionalities and architectures that are a better fit for the type of applications envisaged with our customers.

The funds will help the company ramp up its production capacity from a few million printed circuits units today to a hundred million flexible integrated circuits later this year (each circuit typically consisting of a few hundred gates).

We are aiming at a ten-fold capacity expansion. The market for flexible electronics is still developing and could represent a few tens of millions units for us in the near future, but building a higher capacity is also about building more confidence, so we can go where our customers may want to go in terms of volumes, said white.

For PragmatIC Printing, the higher throughput will also mean faster design iterations and shrinking delivery times for new circuits, with the ability to run a mix of designs concurrently, fulfilling customer orders while still being able to fine tune its processes and characterize new circuit blocks.

Currently, the feature size of the transistors we pattern on flexible substrates (on a sheet-basis) is in the single-digit micrometre range, told us White, but we know that both our process and materials could work at much smaller scales, we have proven workable design rules down to 50nm and we have our own version of Moores law already mapped out he added. In fact, we expect our design rules to shrink much faster than Moores law.

Continued here:

IP blocks line up for plastic electronics