At FutureX Capital, we invest in next-generation leaders who are building the future through technology innovation. As always, we are commited to bringing our tech founders and experts together and having a conversation with our community. On 26^th November, 2022, we organized the “World-changing Disruptive Innovation Company: Navigating the Opportunites and Challenges” in-person seminar (with livestreaming session) in Singapore - where we were honored to have Dr. Shining (Simon) Yang , the founder of ICLeague, with us and to share his insights on disruptive innovation in semiconductor industry. Below are the key takeaways from Dr. Yang’s sharing.

Megatrend in Post-Moore Law Period

Let’s revisit the Moore’s Law in the semiconductor industry: the density of integrated circuits doubles, and the cost halves every 18 months. This law has been maintained as sizes of integrated circuit devices have been shrinking for about 50 years. This law ends when CMOS reaches 40-28 nm, meaning that the previous physical theorem does not hold.

The next trend in the Post-Moore law period is the System on Heterogeneous Integration (SOH). In the future, heterogeneous integration is needed for chips with higher integration, performance, and power requirements. And ICLeague’s goal is to be the platform supporting the megatrends. SOH refers to the integration of different functional modules into a single chip using different integrated circuit processes by the 3D heterogeneous integration method. ICLeague grasped the trend more than three years ago when the company was founded.

Technology Breakthroughs accomplished by ICLeague

ICLeague is able to make high-performance chip because we have a great breakthrough in the Hybrid Bonding process. With the new Hybrid Bonding technology, it is possible to provide millions of connections from wafer to wafer directly, avoiding data transfer between different chips via data bus and switching data transmission between parallel or serial. Everything is combined together in one single chip.

As Simon concludes, “We can not change the environment. The only thing that we can do is grasp all the potential opportunities and take a leap, even under great risk. Do nobody dare to do is the way we succeed.”

Dive deep with ICLeauge 

As Ms Cynthia Zhang summarizes our investment rationale in the closing remark, FutureX focuses on investing companies created by the next generation leaders who are building the future through technology innovation. ICLeague is the pioneer in the semiconductor industry. While “Copy Exactly” is the philosophy of many players in the industry, the team behind ICLeague has been innovating since the date of establishment. A team of serial entrepreneurs and industry veterans with commercialization experience is uncommon and precious in the deep tech space in China and in the entire world. We appreciate the mutual trust built between ICLeague and FutureX. FutureX Capital is currentlythe largest institutional shareholder since the first round of fundraising ofICLeague.

About Dr. Shining (Simon) Yang

Dr. Shining (Simon) Yang is the vice managing director of Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), who brings YMTC to a new height in the 3D NAND industry.

Dr. Yang founded ICLeague in 2018. In 2020, ICLeague debuted its heterogeneous integration technology on chip (HITOC), an AI-oriented IC development, which breaks down the limit between storage and computing for homogeneous chips and integrates data storage with computing, which will play a significant role in accelerating the upgrading of industries through artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

As an experienced executive in the semiconductor industry for over 30 years, Dr. Yang served as the CEO of XMC, COO/CTO of SMIC, and CTO/SVP of Chartered Semiconductor (Now GlobalFoundries), in charge of the fab operation and technical R&D. Before that, he was in the Portland Technology Development sector of Intel for more than 10 years, in which he led a series of technical R&D projects and won Intel STAR Award. Dr. Yang obtained a Master’s Degree and a Doctoral Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds more than 40 patents and over 30 publishments.

About ICLeague

ICLeague is an IC technology company that provides innovative sensor-memory-computation single IC system chip development and hardware solutions. It was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Zhejiang Province, China. It also has an R&D center in Shanghai, China. ICLeague develops heterogeneous integration technology on chip(HITOC) for integrated IC systems focusing on high-performance computing and high bandwidth memory applications with low power consumption. It designs and builds IC chips for high-end application markets such as cloud computing, the internet of things, big data, smart manufacturing, autonomous driving, etc. ICLeague also provides its customers with HITOC technology implementation for their specific high-performance application IC products.

About FutureX Capital

FutureX Capital was founded in early 2018 by the former China AMC Private Equity founding team, focusing on investing in China's growing high-tech enterprises with subversive innovation, attaching importance to value creation and industrial empowerment, and deeply participating in the full cycle of enterprise development.

The companies with the highest value of innovative technologies in the world and the fast-exploding downstream applications are the target companies most concerned by FutureX Capital. FutureX Capital aims to promote these advanced technology companies to the industrial platform in order to further develop their potential. Representative investments include Kingsoft Cloud, ByteDance, Meituan, NIO, PingCAP, UnionTech, Smartsens, etc.

Adhering to the concept of open source, FutureX Capital continuously attracts a wide range of industrial resources, financial resources, and expert networks, conducts multi-faceted exchanges and cooperation with top entrepreneurs, gathers top-level knowledge, forms forward-looking insights and cross-industry synergy to explore investment opportunities.