In an industry long dominated by silicon, a quiet revolution is taking shape. At DesignCon 2025, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Vincent Barlier, Commercial Director Foundry at Pragmatic Semiconductor, detailed his company’s groundbreaking approach to chip manufacturing—one that eliminates silicon in favor of a flexible and more sustainable alternative.
Pragmatic Semiconductor, a U.K.-based company, has reimagined semiconductor manufacturing. Rather than traditional silicon wafers, it employs a thin-film transistor (TFT) process on a flexible substrate. The result is a technology that delivers high-density circuitry enabling the manufacture of logic circuitry with a cost-efficient process. This innovation is also energy-efficient, and significantly more sustainable than conventional silicon wafer manufacturing.
A Unique Foundry Proposition
“We are a foundry, but we do things differently,” Barlier explained. “Our unique process does not use silicon, which removes the need for ionic implantation and high-temperature annealing steps. We use vapour deposition, coating, and photolithography to manufacture our wafers which reduces the wafer production cycle time to days instead of months. This streamlined process allows Pragmatic’s fabs to be significantly smaller than traditional semiconductor facilities, with drastically reduced energy, water and chemical requirements.”
Unlike traditional fabs that require billions of dollars in capital expenditure and years to construct, Pragmatic’s compact facilities can be quickly built, at a fraction of the cost, making semiconductor manufacturing more accessible and scalable. The company’s first fully operational fab in North East England – the UK’s first 300mm wafer facility – already has capacity to produce billions of chips per year, and a second facility is in development.
