Solmates Promised the EIC Accelerator a 5G Laser Tool: The Record

Most chip films are sputtered or grown from gases. Solmates, a spin-off of the University of Twente in Enschede, bet on a third way: firing a laser at a target so that a plume of plasma settles on a silicon wafer as a film a few atoms thick. The technique, pulsed laser deposition (PLD), had been a research tool for small samples. Solmates built machines that coat whole wafers, and twice asked the European Union to help it take them into mass production for 5G radio filters.

The first award, FIVE-G, came from the January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, with an EU contribution of €1,716,750 towards a total cost of €2,452,500, according to CORDIS. The second, 5G-TRAIN, was selected in the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2020 cut-off as blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies. CORDIS lists it at €749,761.25 of EU money and records that it was "terminated on 15 February 2022". Eight days earlier, on 7 February 2022, the sale of Solmates to Lam Research, the US chip equipment maker, had been entered in the Dutch merger register, according to Bits&Chips.

Where Solmates Stands Now: Inside Lam Research

Solmates no longer operates as an independent company. Neither side issued a press release when Lam Research bought it; Bits&Chips found the deal through Solmates' own website, which said the company "remains as an organization within Lam Research". The price was not disclosed. In a column of 7 June 2022, Bits&Chips' René Raaijmakers described Solmates as "a small player with substantial debt" and wrote that "the sum was so low that there was no obligation to report it". The acquisition is confirmed by a 2024 seminar biography at the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, which says co-founder Matthijn Dekkers ran Solmates' research as CTO until "in 2022 SolMateS was acquired by Lam Research", where he became Director of Engineering in PLD.

The Enschede operation still exists under its new owner. Lam's own list of locations names an Enschede site, NLD-01, at Auke Vleerstraat 3, the same address that CORDIS gives for Solmates in both EIC projects. The Dutch legal entity is a different matter: North Data marks SolMateS B.V. as terminated, without giving a date or a reason, and shows a last balance sheet for 31 December 2024, filed on 18 March 2025. The Dutch trade register entry itself could not be checked free of charge, so whether the company was merged into another Lam entity or dissolved could not be verified. How many people work in Enschede today is not public.

The Technology: Laser-Grown Films for 5G Filters

Phones and base stations use radio filters to let through only the frequencies they should hear. Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters, which the 5G-TRAIN proposal targeted, rely on a piezoelectric film that turns electrical signals into vibrations and back. Lam Research, on its product page, says a high scandium content in aluminium scandium nitride films improves filter performance, and that such layers "cannot practically be deposited by conventional technologies like PVD reactive sputtering".

PLD sidesteps part of the problem. A pulsed laser vaporises a target of the exact material wanted, and the plasma plume carries that composition to the wafer, which lets complex oxides and nitrides grow layer by layer. Its weaknesses were size and dirt: lab systems coated areas of about 10 by 10 millimetres, as Laser Focus World reported in 2016, and particles thrown off the target spoil chips. Solmates scaled the method to 200-millimetre wafers, and Bits&Chips says it later extended coverage to 300 millimetres.

Before the EIC money, its customers were research labs. In April 2016 it won an order from imec, the Leuven nanoelectronics centre, according to the University of Twente, which bought a system for its own MESA+ NanoLab the same year. The FIVE-G proposal on CORDIS names imec, EPFL and Sintef as sites with Solmates equipment and puts its processes at technology readiness level 6.

What the Two EIC Projects Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

FIVE-G ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 December 2020 with four objectives: learn what filter makers require, cut particle contamination to the level 5G parts need, adapt Solmates' PLD to cluster manufacturing, and sign a distribution agreement ahead of launch. The final periodic report lists process development for lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and lead-free scandium aluminium nitride films "that meet the requirements of 5G component manufacturers", equipment improvements for high-volume production, and the design of a next-generation cluster reactor. It then speaks of the cluster prototype in the future tense: it "will be assembled and tested", and an updated version "will be installed" at a 5G component maker. No distribution agreement is mentioned.

5G-TRAIN was meant to build that cluster. Its eight objectives ran from an updated business plan to a prototype high-volume PLD cluster, a demonstration at a customer site and company growth, over 24 months from 1 March 2021. Solmates' own report on the project's single period is blunt: "as a result of the termination, most of the objectives are not or partly met." Neither CORDIS nor the report gives the reason for the termination. The timing, eight days after the Lam deal was registered, is on the record; the link between the two is not stated in any source found.

1. FIVE-G: 5G piezo film processes (PZT, ScAlN)DeliveredReported as meeting 5G component makers' requirements, CORDIS.
2. FIVE-G: cluster reactor for volume productionPartlyDesign finished; prototype assembly still described as future work at project end.
3. FIVE-G: distribution agreementNot reportedNot mentioned in the CORDIS report; no agreement announced.
4. 5G-TRAIN: prototype cluster and customer demonstrationNot achievedProject terminated 15 February 2022; "most of the objectives are not or partly met".
5. Volume-production PLD tool on the marketUnder LamLam launched its Pulsus PLD tool in March 2024, outside the EIC projects.

What Came After: Lam's Production Laser Tool

On 27 March 2024 Lam Research introduced Pulsus, which it called the world's first production-oriented pulsed laser deposition tool, for MEMS microphones and radio filters, according to Silicon Semiconductor and EMSNow. Both report Lam's claims that the tool deposits aluminium scandium nitride with at least 40% scandium, with twice the piezoelectric coefficient of sputtered films, and that it was shipping to "select specialty device manufacturers". Neither names a customer, and neither mentions Solmates.

The line from Enschede to Pulsus runs through Solmates' people. Arjen Janssens, Solmates' chief executive in 2016 according to Laser Focus World, presented Pulsus as Lam's Senior Director, Pulsed Laser Deposition, in a Silicon Semiconductor interview, and Dekkers' MIT talk in April 2024 described how PLD "was scaled to the wafer level and to high volume manufacturing". Lam's product page for the Pulsus family now redirects to a product called Prestis, which Lam says enables mass production of films with 40% or more scandium and builds on its installed base of 2300 transport modules, "creating a synergy with other Lam products such as etch". That matches the kind of volume-production cluster 5G-TRAIN set out to build. Whether Prestis uses the reactor designed under FIVE-G could not be verified.

The Enschede team also kept winning EU research work after the sale, under its new owner's name. In 14ACMOS, a Horizon Europe project on 14-angstrom chip technology that began on 1 December 2022, CORDIS lists the Enschede partner as Lam Research International BV at Auke Vleerstraat 3, Solmates' address, with €208,500 of EU funding, working with imec, Tokyo Electron and Coventor on process modules, according to the project page. The same entity at the same address is a partner in HICONNECTS (from 1 January 2023, €270,000) and Listen2Future (from 1 February 2023, €280,906.25), a project on piezoelectric MEMS acoustic sensors. North Data attributes all three grants to SolMateS B.V.

The Money and the Equity Question

Both EIC grants covered 70% of the project cost. For 5G-TRAIN, CORDIS shows the figures after termination; whether the €749,761.25 is the amount originally awarded or a reduced figure is not stated. The award was listed as blended finance, but no public record found for this article shows that the EIC Fund ever invested in Solmates. The fund's portfolio page does not list its companies in a searchable form, no announcement of an EIC investment was found, and Lam's purchase was recorded less than a year into the project. No other venture round for Solmates is public. Its filed accounts, available only through paid services, could not be checked.

Why Europe Should Care

5G-TRAIN's proposal promised to strengthen Europe's position in 5G and 6G and to reduce "dependency from US and China for critical communication technology". The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to "ensure the resilience of supply chains and reduce external dependencies" in semiconductors, according to the European Commission. Solmates' story cuts both ways against that goal. The technology reached volume production, and the engineering stayed in Enschede. Ownership of it moved to California, and the second EU project meant to put a European cluster tool on the market stopped before it could.

The Verdict

Solmates and Lam Research have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.