Company Overview and Background

ConScience AB was founded to address a critical gap in the micro- and nanotechnology market: the "valley of death" between university-level research and commercial-scale semiconductor foundry manufacturing. While academic cleanrooms are excellent for basic research, and large industrial foundries are designed for millions of units, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and deep-tech startups often struggle to find partners capable of handling low-volume, highly customized, and iterative fabrication runs.

ConScience AB addresses this by offering expert contract research and manufacturing services (CRMS). The company is headquartered in Gothenburg, a major technological hub in Sweden, allowing it to leverage a highly educated talent pool and maintain a close collaborative relationship with Chalmers University of Technology and the Myfab national research infrastructure.

Core Business Areas

ConScience AB operates across four primary pillars, utilizing advanced micro- and nanofabrication techniques to serve clients in various high-tech sectors:

1. Quantum Technology

The company has positioned itself as a key player in the emerging quantum hardware supply chain. Quantum computing, communication, and sensing require incredibly precise manufacturing processes down to the nanometer scale. ConScience designs, fabricates, and characterizes superconducting quantum devices, helping researchers and commercial quantum developers scale their hardware architectures.

2. Microfluidics

For life sciences, diagnostics, and chemical synthesis clients, ConScience develops and manufactures microfluidic chips. These devices manipulate microscopic amounts of fluids and are critical for lab-on-a-chip (LoC) diagnostics, organ-on-a-chip models, and point-of-care medical devices.

3. MEMS and Sensors

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) combine electrical and mechanical components on a single chip. ConScience provides design and fabrication services for custom MEMS devices, including physical sensors, optical modulators, and acoustic wave devices.

4. Nanofabrication and Surface Science

The company provides general nanofabrication services, utilizing advanced lithography and deposition techniques to engineer materials at the atomic and molecular levels. This includes creating nanostructured surfaces for optics, catalysis, and materials science research.

Products and Services Portfolio

ConScience AB offers a comprehensive suite of services that spans the entire product development lifecycle, from initial design consultation to pilot-scale production.

Quantum Devices and Hardware (The Qi0 Chip)

One of ConScience AB's landmark commercial product offerings is the Qi0 quantum test chip. * Purpose: The Qi0 chip is a standardized superconducting quantum device designed to help quantum researchers and companies calibrate, benchmark, and test their measurement setups (such as dilution refrigerators, microwave cabling, and control electronics) without risking expensive or proprietary processor chips. * Specifications: It typically features high-quality factor superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators, Josephson junctions, or basic qubit architectures fabricated on high-purity silicon or sapphire substrates. * Value Proposition: By providing a reliable, pre-characterized baseline device, ConScience enables quantum labs to isolate noise and systematically debug their microwave measurement lines.

Foundry and Custom Fabrication Services

ConScience acts as a boutique foundry, offering custom fabrication runs tailored to specific client designs. These services include:

• Lithography:
  • Electron Beam Lithography (EBL): Used for extreme precision patterning down to sub-10 nanometer resolutions. This is essential for quantum dots, photonic crystals, and advanced gate geometries.
  • Photolithography: For micro-scale patterning down to approximately 1 micrometer, utilizing contact and projection aligners.
• Thin Film Deposition:
  • Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD): Including electron-beam evaporation and sputtering of metals (Al, Ti, Au, Pt, Cr, Nb, Ta) and dielectrics.
  • Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD): For conformal, atomic-scale thickness control of oxide and nitride layers.
  • Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD/PECVD): For high-quality dielectric films like silicon dioxide ($SiO_2$) and silicon nitride ($Si_3N_4$).
• Etching Technologies:
  • Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) and Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE): For creating high-aspect-ratio trenches in silicon, glass, and quartz (highly critical for MEMS and microfluidics).
  • Wet Chemical Etching: For isotropic and anisotropic material removal.
• Metrology and Characterization:
  • Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) for high-resolution imaging.
  • Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) for surface roughness and topography mapping.
  • Profilometry and Ellipsometry for film thickness and optical property verification.

Process Development and Prototyping

Many clients come to ConScience with a conceptual design but lack the recipe to fabricate it. ConScience offers structured process development services: * Feasibility Studies: Evaluating if a proposed design is manufacturable given current material science limitations. * Recipe Optimization: Adjusting parameters (etch rates, deposition temperatures, resist choices) to maximize yield and device performance. * Iterative Prototyping: Executing rapid-turnaround fabrication runs to test and refine device performance based on physical testing results.

Contract Manufacturing and Pilot Production

Once a process is stable, ConScience transitions the client to low-volume contract manufacturing. This service is ideal for companies that need hundreds to thousands of chips per year to support commercial product sales, clinical trials, or extensive field testing, but cannot justify the capital expenditure of building their own cleanroom facility.

Facilities and Technology Infrastructure

ConScience AB operates primarily out of the MC2 Nanofabrication Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. This facility is one of the premier cleanrooms in Europe and is part of Myfab, the Swedish national infrastructure for micro- and nanofabrication.

Key attributes of this operational setup include: * Class 10 to Class 1000 (ISO 4 to ISO 7) Cleanroom Areas: Ensuring extremely low particulate levels to prevent defects during critical lithography and deposition steps. * Advanced Equipment Access: Through this setup, ConScience utilizes state-of-the-art industrial-grade tools, including high-voltage EBL systems, cluster sputter tools, and advanced dry etching systems that would be financially prohibitive for a standalone startup to purchase and maintain. * Strict Quality Control: The combination of academic research excellence and industrial discipline allows ConScience to maintain rigorous quality control protocols, ensuring reproducibility between fabrication batches.

Strategic Value Proposition

ConScience AB occupies a unique niche in the semiconductor and hardware ecosystem:

• Intellectual Property (IP) Protection: Unlike academic collaborations where IP sharing can become complex, ConScience operates under strict commercial contract research models. The client retains full ownership of their designs, proprietary processes, and resulting IP.
• Expertise-Driven Problem Solving: The engineering team at ConScience consists of PhD-level scientists and cleanroom veterans with decades of combined experience in physics, materials science, and electrical engineering. This allows them to troubleshoot complex process failures that standard foundry operators cannot diagnose.
• Bridge to Scale: By assisting clients in standardizing their fabrication recipes on industry-standard equipment, ConScience prepares these technologies for eventual transfer to larger commercial foundries when production volume requirements grow.