SandBox Semiconductor is an Austin-based startup aiming to address this problem by revolutionizing process development for Semiconductor manufacturing.

Meghali Chopra is CEO of Sandbox Semiconductor, which aims to solve a bottleneck in semiconductor manufacturing: the long development cycles necessary to create new chips.

Meghali and Sonali Chopra will represent The University of Texas at Austin to compete against some of world’s top universities for more than $1 million in prizes at the 17th annual Rice Plan Competition at Rice University in Houston.

More than $1 billion is spent on etch and deposition semiconductor process development per year. Developed from her five years of doctoral research, Chopra’s software accelerates the creation of etch and deposition recipes by a factor of three, saving development costs and speeding time to market for semiconductor products by 66 percent.