Replacing lenses with algorithms, Eindhoven-based AIM Solutions believes it can fill an important gap between today’s optical and scanning-probe semiconductor metrology tools. The startup eyes advanced packaging as its first target market. When Yifeng Shao signed the incorporation papers for AIM Solutions in June 2024, he suddenly found himself in unfamiliar territory. “You walk out the door and you have a company,” he recalls. “But I didn’t really know what to do. I had never run a company before.” Two years later, the startup occupies its own lab at Eindhoven’s High Tech Campus, employs twelve people with more joining soon and has built the first prototypes of a technology that originated in academic research but is now being engineered into an industrial metrology platform. AIM Solutions is a spin-off from Delft University of Technology, which spearheaded the Linx project, an NWO-funded consortium of five universities, TNO and several companies (including ASML). The goal was to investigate lensless imaging of nanostructures using EUV light. The project culminated in a Nature cover publication demonstrating that computational techniques could reconstruct highly detailed images from diffraction patterns rather than conventional optical images. While the academic work focused on proving the concept with extreme ultraviolet light, Shao saw commercial potential in wavelength-agnostic topography measurement. Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. Turning university research into a company required nearly a year of negotiations over intellectual property. Industrial partners participating in the original research consortium were first given the opportunity to acquire the technology but declined. TU Delft subsequently transferred the IP to the new company in exchange for an equity stake rather than a licensing agreement, giving AIM full ownership of the technology. Today, AIM’s management team combines academic expertise with industrial experience. Shao is CEO and leads technology development. His former colleague at TU Delft, Sven Weerdenburg, briefly worked at ASML before taking on an adventure at the startup after all. He now heads AIM’s systems engineering. Finally, Jan Hoefnagels, a seasoned business professional in the high-tech industry and experienced at supporting startups, joined as part-time CFO and COO after first encountering the company while evaluating its funding proposal. Arbitrary Given that lithography depends on complex optics to project chip features onto the wafer, using optics to do the reverse – to image them – seems a no-brainer. This approach carries two major downsides. First, optics are expensive, especially in the EUV domain. More importantly, conventional imaging systems produce only intensity images, making it practically impossible to extract accurate three-dimensional information about semiconductor structures. Applying the results from the Linx project, AIM eliminates the imaging optics. Instead of forming an image directly, the system illuminates a sample and records the resulting diffraction pattern. Sophisticated reconstruction algorithms then calculate both the amplitude and phase of the reflected light. Because the phase contains information about surface height, the reconstructed image becomes a quantitative three-dimensional topography map rather than simply a photograph. The algorithms work for the entire spectrum of light, including DUV, EUV and infrared. “We’re wavelength agnostic. The same computational framework works across different wavelengths. The application determines which wavelength makes the most sense,” says Weerdenburg. Since DUV and EUV light don’t penetrate materials deeply, they’re primarily useful to probe surface structures. IR, by contrast, penetrates more easily into silicon and other chip materia