PhantaField has received its first angel investment from Prof. Chenming Hu — TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and the inventor of the FinFET, the three-dimensional transistor that has carried the entire semiconductor industry from the 22 nm node to today. For a 2D-materials startup, no early backer could be more fitting.
Hu's career is, in a sense, the prologue to PhantaField's thesis. The FinFET solved the problem of electrostatic control by lifting the channel off the wafer and wrapping the gate around it on three sides — proof that when planar scaling stalls, the answer is to go vertical and to get the gate closer to the channel. Atomically thin 2D semiconductors are the logical end point of exactly that idea: a channel so thin the gate commands every atom in it, with nowhere for leakage to hide.
A bet on the next dimension
That lineage is why his backing carries weight beyond its dollar value. It signals that the move PhantaField is making — from shrinking transistors in a plane to stacking them in three dimensions, grown one atomic layer at a time — sits on the same line of reasoning that produced the last great transistor architecture.
The investment funded construction of the company's first plasma-photon MOCVD prototype: the 8-inch system that would make its public debut at IEDM just five weeks later, and set everything that followed in motion.