For semiconductor equipment teams

Reasoning, the way your senior engineer would.

Cala reasons through your hardest semiconductor problems from first principles, including the novel ones that no manual covers and no past case matches. It knows your industry's workflows and respects your IP boundaries. Three minutes instead of three weeks. Every claim cited.

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New tool architecture is showing edge-wafer pattern degradation we have not seen on any prior platform. No history to match. Where do we start?

No past case matches this configuration. Reasoning from first principles across the relevant subsystems, three plausible mechanisms in order of physical likelihood:

1.
Edge-zone process gradient from new chamber geometry[First-principle analysis]The new chamber form factor would change edge-region dynamics in a way that produces exactly this radial signature. Has not been seen before because the geometry itself is new.
2.
Wafer-edge handling thermal asymmetry[Physics derivation]If the new handling system contacts the wafer edge differently, edge-zone temperature drift would produce this kind of degradation. Confirmable with a single instrumented wafer test.
3.
Resonance from new actuator design[Mechatronics simulation]The redesigned actuator may introduce a low-amplitude resonance that couples into edge-zone uniformity. Worth FFT analysis on the existing logs.

Ready

The expansion problem

New fabs. New tools. New engineers. The same handful of senior brains.

Chip demand is surging. Foundries and equipment vendors are expanding faster than at any point in the industry's history. New fabs in Arizona, Hsinchu, Dresden, Hwaseong. New tools shipping. New engineers hired by the thousand.

Senior engineering knowledge cannot be hired or trained at the same rate. Training takes years. People jump between companies, taking what they know with them. The handful of engineers who can reason from first principles are spread thinner each quarter.

Cala makes day-one engineers capable of senior reasoning. Not by replacing the seniors, but by encoding how they think.

What Cala compresses

Months of test cycles and dead ends. Or three minutes of reasoning.

Novel troubleshooting · 300M class loss

A defect that took 3 weeks to find. Cala can scope it in 3 minutes.

Without Cala

An advanced-node fab ships flawed wafers for two months. The defect is a 2 nm directional print drift. No alarm fires. No process data flags it. Estimated loss to the foundry: 300 million. Once detected, three weeks of meetings, hypothesis tests, and lab runs across the foundry and equipment vendor to find root cause.

With Cala

Type the same defect description in plain English. In three minutes, Cala produces ranked hypotheses with first-principle reasoning across the toolchain. The top-ranked hypothesis matches what three weeks of testing eventually concluded. Same depth. A thousand times faster. Discussable from the first answer.

Capability development · months of R&D

A 30 percent spec improvement that costs months. Cala can scope it in 3 minutes.

Without Cala

A foundry asks an equipment vendor to improve a critical spec by 30 percent on the next-generation tool. Foundry engineers spend months on parameter tuning. Vendor engineers spend weeks on archive searches before starting a hardware improvement project. Months pass on each side, often in parallel without converging.

With Cala

Either side describes the goal in plain English. In three minutes, Cala proposes prioritized optimization paths grounded in first-principle reasoning across optics, control, and software. Both sides converge on the same analysis. Each path is discussable. Each is cited.

Internal product scoping · weeks of meetings

A new feature request that takes weeks to scope. Cala does the first pass in 3 minutes.

Without Cala

A product manager wants to add a new diagnostic capability to a next-generation tool. Internal review meetings, requirement docs, debate over implementation across four subsystem teams. Each owner has a different mental model. Weeks pass before scope is even agreed.

With Cala

PM types the goal in plain English. In three minutes, Cala synthesizes implementation paths from the relevant subsystem expertise, surfaces the tradeoffs every owner cares about, and produces a scoping draft each team can react to in their next meeting instead of starting from scratch.

The bottleneck was never information. It was reasoning time. Cala collapses that.

How Cala reasons

A senior engineer on call. Faster than your fastest meeting.

Cala chat

Need to improve a critical spec by 30 percent on the next-generation tool. Where is our headroom?

Three optimization paths ranked by leverage on the spec, with first-principle reasoning across the toolchain:

1.
Pupil shaping in the projection optics[Internal optics study, 2025-02]Pupil shape directly modulates printed dimensions across pattern density. Recent simulation suggests a software-only update on the existing aperture design yields meaningful gain.
2.
Spot-shaping algorithm tuning[Algorithm benchmark 03]Spot-to-spot variance is the dominant error term in this regime. Algorithm-level corrections still have headroom that the production recipe has not exploited.
3.
Throughput vs spec tradeoff on critical layers[Throughput correlation, 2024 Q4]Reducing throughput allows more averaging per shot. A 5 percent throughput cost can yield meaningful gain on the most critical layers without hardware changes.

Ready

Every claim cited. Every reasoning step transparent. Every conversation private.

Beyond retrieval

Smarter than RAG. By design.

Generic AI matches keywords against documents. Cala is the intelligence layer above that, the part that reasons through novel problems, the kind a search tool can never help with.

Every claim is grounded and auditable. Your security team can trace any answer back to source. The how stays ours.

Not a RAG. Not a search engine. A reasoning layer.

Deployment

Deployed where your IP requires.

You pick the level. Three options, every one auditable, traceable, and your choice of which AI runs the reasoning.

Level 1

On your own servers.

Air-gapped or in your data center. Your data never leaves your physical infrastructure. The only option for top-tier fabs and vendors.

Level 2

In your private cloud.

Inside your existing AWS, Azure, or GCP account. Your data, your account, your security boundary. We deploy and configure.

Level 3

Managed by Cala.

Hosted single-tenant for teams that need to start fast. Your encryption keys. Your audit logs. Migrate to Level 1 or 2 whenever you are ready.

Engineers shouldn't have to choose between using AI and protecting their company's IP. We've built the boring answer to that.

Two halves of one conversation.

First fifteen minutes: we show Cala reasoning through hard problems on representative semiconductor data. Second fifteen: we hear how your team works, what your reasoning bottlenecks look like, where IP boundaries shape the work. If there's a fit, we scope a pilot together.