Lancaster Physics spinout Quinas Technology recently met with Jun Gu, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Daphne Hsu, Project Section Manager, of Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), at the invitation of the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) in London to discuss a potential partnership. DBT’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Julia Sutcliffe, also joined the meeting.

PSMC was founded in 1994 and is the 7^th largest semiconductor chip foundry in the world, with an annual revenue of NT$44BN (approximately £1BN). Due to the costs associated with constructing such fabrication plants (often referred to as “fabs”), it is common for chip developers to subcontract companies to produce chips on their behalf. The Department of Business and Trade invited both PSMC and Quinas to kickstart discussions between the two regarding a potential contract with PSMC to produce Quinas’ patented ULTRARAM memory chips. ULTRARAM, first developed at Lancaster University, heralds the next generation of memory technologies. Utilising a quantum-mechanical process called “resonant tunnelling”, it provides computational memory which is far more reliable and energy-efficient than its competitors, whilst also retaining very fast write, read, and erase speeds.

Of the meeting with the Department of Business and Trade and PSMC, Professor Hayne, an academic in Lancaster’s Physics Department and Chief Scientific Officer of the company Quinas said: “Quinas were delighted to receive an invitation from the Department of Business and Trade for a private meeting with semiconductor “fab” company PSMC in Whitehall. Whilst further development of ULTRARAM is on-going, we are already actively engaging with potential partners in the manufacturing chain. We are very much looking forward to following up on this exploratory meeting with PSMC and building up a commercial partnership.”

This preliminary meeting signifies an exciting development in Quinas’ life as a spinout from the University. The company celebrated its 1^st birthday as a formally incorporated business back in February this year, having also recently secured a number of prestigious awards last year, including Elektra’s Reader’s Choice for “University Research Group of the Year”, and the “Most Innovative Startup” at the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley.