(December 27, 2010) — Terepac Corporation has been accepted into the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, an incubator in the heart of Silicon Valley. Terepac’s footprint in Silicon Valley is the company’s first presence in the United States.
Founded in 2004 to commercialize innovations in printable miniaturized electronics, the company is now transitioning from R&D into pilot line production. The company’s investors include John Thompson, (former vice chairman of IBM Worldwide) and John Pollock (former Chairman and CEO Electrohome Limited) while its technical advisors include Dr. Joel Birnbaum (former Chief Scientist of Hewlett-Packard, and former Director of HP Laboratories), and Dr. Yoshio Nishi (former SVP and Director of R&D of Texas Instruments’ Semiconductor Group). Terepac collaborated with research consortium IMEC in 2009.
Whereas conventional methods of semiconductor packaging cannot effectively handle objects smaller than one-half millimeter, Terepac’s proprietary process liberates Moore’s law enabling sophisticated microelectronics to be printed on flexible substrates at a fraction of the size — down to submicron scale — with nanometer precision and at a cost far lower than that of creating conventional rigid circuits. Entire devices with microprocessors, memory, and sensors can be reduced to less than a millimeter square, thinner than paper, and flexible enough to bend around a pencil with no sacrifice in performance.
Because the size, weight and rigidity of the underlying electronics often determines the form of an end product, Terepac’s breakthroughs enables existing electronic devices to be delivered in order of magnitude smaller (and flexible) form factors when compared to today’s offerings. In addition, Terepac enables electronics to be cost-effectively embedded into a range of objects and devices, transforming them into smart objects. Given the rise in smart phones, mobile phones, geolocation, and the Internet of Things, the ability to enable objects to report on their location or condition, as well as to communicate, interact, and transact with users, will become increasingly valuable, says the company.
Terepac is headquartered in Canada’s Technology Triangle in Waterloo, Ontario, and in 2010 established a European subsidiary, Terepac GmbH, in Dresden, Germany (Silicon Saxony). Learn more at http://terepac.com/
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