Multibeam signs $140 million CHIPS deal to advance electron-beam chip packaging

Multibeam Corporation has signed a Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $140 million in proposed federal funding through the CHIPS Research and Development Office. The money is earmarked to speed up development of fine-pitch advanced packaging process flows built around the company's MBX platform, a multi-column electron-beam lithography (MEBL) system Multibeam calls the industry's first.

The Sunnyvale, California company is one of seven recipients named in a Commerce Department announcement covering $874 million in CHIPS R&D letters of intent. Each deal still requires further diligence and Commerce approval before funds are finalized, and in exchange, the department takes a minority, non-controlling equity stake in every company on the list.

For engineers running interconnect and inspection lines, the number worth watching is the claimed cut in chip-to-chip power. President Ken MacWilliams said the MBX platform reduces chip-to-chip power "by more than 10x" while supporting increasingly complex heterogeneous device architectures. That combination of density and power efficiency targets a real bottleneck: as packages move from a handful of dies to wafer-scale systems with hundreds of chiplets, verifying alignment and interconnect quality at ever-finer pitch becomes the harder problem on the manufacturing floor.

The initial application targets AI and high-performance computing systems, where multi-chip architectures are increasingly replacing monolithic dies as the path to more compute. Multibeam frames the work as an extension of Moore's law by other means: instead of shrinking transistors on a single die, gains come from stitching more chiplets together with denser, lower-power interconnects.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Bill Frauenhofer, the department's executive director for semiconductor innovation and investment, both described the letters of intent as part of a broader effort to secure domestic compute supply chains under the CHIPS and Science Act. Frauenhofer said the incentives cover photonics integration, novel memory architectures, advanced packaging and substrates.

Final terms remain unsettled. Commerce has not said when it expects to convert the seven letters of intent, Multibeam's included, into signed awards, and the CHIPS Research and Development Office is still soliciting new proposals from other applicants under a separate grant announcement.