What is a big enough challenge for an industry professional who wants to make an impact?

At Black Semiconductor, we have been able to bring together a highly diverse group of ambitious professionals who rethink technology and try novel approaches. They might have leaped from traditional roles in settled organizations or have transitioned from academia to industry for the first time. The common nominator for them, however, is the urge to make an impact that lasts and be surrounded by other passionate people sharing the same drive.

A newly found company environment, in most cases, offers a highly diverse work environment with many interesting topics and the potential to develop oneself professionally and in a unique way. Our forward-thinking and self-organized team members also appreciate the fact that their job description can be unusually wide when the company is in its early stages. Also, when thinking about applying for a leadership position, the opportunity to build teams from scratch who really fit the purpose and operate without the burden of legacy routines and ways of working is extremely seductive.

But do those starting their careers have different expectations and value drivers than more experienced industry professionals? And thinking of their professional background, what are the key attributes they look for when evaluating the company they will be working for?

For this article, we interviewed our CTO, Dr. Cedric Huyghebaert, who is driving the tech at Black Semiconductor and brings over 20 years of experience from the semiconductor field. He joined the company in its seed funding stage and as an R&D professional coming from a large semiconductor research corporation, he is a perfect example of starting a new journey in a young company. He is confident that he and Black Semiconductor can make a big impact in the semiconductor industry.

“I guess I can say I’m a technical person. For me, the essence is the journey and the way you look at things,” says Cedric who is always seemingly humble and often feels a bit uncomfortable to be in the limelight or at the center of discussion. He is motivated by coaching young scientists at the company and guiding their ambitions toward the right direction. He is always inspired by seeing their drive and vision so early on. Instead of being a distant leader, he strives to be available for his colleagues, choosing to spend his work days in the open office space with his team. And as young companies usually have one core project that must become successful, the team needs to be tightly together and build the core of the company.

When asked about his passions in life, the answer might not be from your average technologically oriented person as he refers to being interested in social mechanisms and society in general; why people behave the way they do, and why are they saying what they are saying.

“I’m interested in not just technology per se but also understanding how things work in society?and how scientific theory gets adopted by the community. In the specific case of Black Semiconductor's technology, I’m very curious on how the industry, will react to the disruptiveness of the technology,” he continues. Cedric has a classical Latin-based high school education. Math and physics came later in his studies, but the need to understand how nature works and really trying to understand how things are set up was the main motivator for his studies. To satisfy this hunger for understanding, he gathered a master’s degree in philosophy of science.

"Would you be interested in joining a startup?"

Cedric has always liked working with Dr.-Ing. Daniel Schall, our CEO and cofounder. They met during a European project in 2014 and started bumping into each other at several other conferences. There was always a mutual respect between the two scientists based on a shared profound scientific understanding. They started casually keeping in touch. Cedric recalls a funny episode, probably around some conference many years back, when they were at a bar and Daniel said that he had just started Black Semiconductor. “Suddenly he asked me if I could imagine to joining his startup,” Cedric recalls.

However, at that time there wasn’t much of a company yet, no funding, barely anything. Then fast forward some two years when Daniel approached Cedric again and explained the company’s early strategy and plans and asked him again to join. At that time Cedric was truly caught by the renewed visionary narrative of Daniel and his brother Sebastian Schall that was engendered and gave his feedback in an informal and non-technical way. In any case, they were starting to figure out the pieces of an extremely large puzzle scattered around the table and perhaps Cedric also got some sort of inspiration out of it since the opportunity was so huge, but clearly attainable with a proper plan and exceptional team.

“Then at some point the seed funding round was there and I had to do the decision.”

Black Semiconductor was over ten years in the making, and it finally got a great launch with some of the world’s greatest investors, such as Hermann Hauser (ARM) and many more deep-tech professionals. The seed round was 6,2 million euros plus roughly 5 million public funding. Cedric was amazed by the founders’ tenacity and all the million things they had done to push through the obstacles. Things were looking great; the future of Black Semiconductor’s technology was promising and eventually, he had to make a decision. But the decision wasn’t hard to do. In fact, he needed a breakout from his 22 years of career in the same company.

Cedric has seen a lot of operation, fabrication, and integration of materials in the 300mm (12-inch silicon wafer) production environment. He has also been a lab manager while doing science, solving a great deal of challenges. With all the relentless organizing and developing experience, he is confident to bring a contribution to the semiconductor industry through Black Semiconductor’s approach.

“The main focus is to bring graphene into the semiconductor world.”

The 500-billion-euro semiconductor industry is currently in an extraordinarily exciting stage as the downscaling of transistors is nearing the physical limits. At the same time, the computer industry is experiencing exponential growth in demand for information processing and data communication.

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Black Semiconductor has a grand vision and the means to do it. Our technology is tackling the scaling problem with the possibility of adding more transistors through the optical networking of chips, ultimately creating chip fabrics the size of computer racks or even data centers without bandwidth limitations. This ensures independence from the established, yet very cost-intensive procedure of scaling transistors. Also, this technology works with any chip.

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Cedric is motivated by grand technological challenges, to be hands-on, and to make important technological decisions as Chief Technology Officer. Growing the company, setting up perfect teams, and coaching are at the core of his inspiration.

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“Our ambition at Black Semiconductor is really to make a major contribution to the semiconductor industry.” He emphasizes that the first focus is to bring graphene into the semiconductor world. Cedric describes and continues by saying that if everything works the way they have planned, it might be one of the top stories of this decade. “This contribution of ours will not just be on device level, but also on architecture and system level as well,” he continues.

“Opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Our technology is an enabler. It’s opening doors for completely new possibilities, materializing new opportunities,” he continues and highlights that this is also one of Black Semiconductor’s strengths when attracting other industry professionals. Also contributing to a meaningful cause and being able to witness the direct impact of one’s work can be a powerful motivator. In a smaller company, people often wear multiple hats and take on diverse responsibilities.

"From Aachen Germany to the world."

Cedric likes that a young company is bringing a little bit of uncertainty. In his view, this uncertainty brings focus where achieving the milestones is the only way to survive. However, Cedric also mentions there are some challenges ahead. One of these is to turn the slightly distant location of the current main operation into an opportunity. Black Semiconductor is in Aachen, Germany, and in Europe, acceleration of the technology transfer from research to industry as well as the Chips Act work in favor of the future scaling of Black Semiconductor.

Black Semiconductor has started its journey from material science, one of the most exciting ones, and really understanding its potential for high-performing computing needs. Bringing graphene to these systems is huge.

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When deep-tech companies are still small and fresh out of research labs with reasonable funding for a few years even, they can rapidly do wonders in a small team that would otherwise take much longer time in a larger company to push through the internal processes and ultimately find the right people in the team.

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We at Black Semiconductor admire individuals with a thirst for knowledge and a large skill set, who aspire to create extraordinary technology. In our view, successful companies also adopt a flat organizational model to attract and retain smart, forward-thinking creatives, allowing anyone to make decisions, collaborate, and achieve great things together.