The annual LEAP Awards recognizes and celebrates innovative products and technologies in engineering. Here are the 2025 LEAP Awards Winners in the Advanced Materials category.
Gold
SiTime
MEMS-based precision timing technology
The judges commented: “Great alternative to the traditional quartz timing systems. Good work! Surely a great advancement in the field, with very wide application areas.” Congratulations!
As AI expands beyond cloud data centers to edge, mobility, and LEO satellites, SiTime’s Precision Timing technology becomes foundational. Its latest ClkSoC innovation, Chorus, integrates resonator, oscillator, and clocking functions into a single die, which eliminates quartz entirely and cuts development time by weeks. The result is more synchronized, smarter, and safer electronics everywhere.
SiTime is redefining the timing market by replacing aging quartz technology with advanced microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based precision timing. The company’s innovation isn’t just about better materials; it’s about creating a new category: Precision Timing. While crystal oscillators have been used for decades, they’re fragile, susceptible to temperature variation, EMI, and vibration. SiTime’s silicon MEMS timing devices are 50x more reliable, 100x more resilient to EMI, and offer 5x better stability over temperature than quartz, making them ideal for the world’s most demanding environments, from AI data centers and 5G networks to autonomous vehicles, aerospace, and defense.
Purpose-built in CMOS fabs, the MEMS resonators are extremely compact and manufactured at scale. They integrate seamlessly into systems and help customers reduce design complexity and board space while improving performance. The programmable architecture enables rapid customization for different use cases and faster time to market. These advantages help engineers rethink what’s possible in harsh conditions, such as extreme cold, shock, or high-altitude environments. SiTime’s devices power more than 3 billion systems globally, including Apple, Tesla, NVIDIA, Neuralink, and many more.
Silver
HP Printing and Computing Solutions S.L.
HP 3D HR PA12 Flame Retardant (enabled by Evonik)
HP 3D HR PA12 FR, developed in collaboration with Evonik for HP’s Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) platform, is a halogen-free, flame-retardant material engineered specifically for additive manufacturing (AM). This innovative material allows manufacturers to rethink product design by enabling the creation of lightweight, complex geometries that optimize both safety and performance — advantages previously difficult to achieve with conventional manufacturing methods.
Certified to UL 94 V0 at 2.5 mm, HP 3D HR PA12 FR offers a rare combination of flame resistance, thermal stability, electrical insulation, and dimensional accuracy. Its high-quality surface finish and mechanical properties make it a robust solution for demanding industrial applications, all while complying with stringent safety and regulatory standards. In terms of sustainability, the material supports up to 60% reusability, drastically reducing material waste and lowering overall carbon emissions. This contributes to circular production models.
By leveraging HP’s advanced AM technology, users can achieve:
- Greater design freedom, allowing for bespoke, high-performance parts
- Cost-efficient production, through streamlined workflows and lower material waste
- Enhanced sustainability, via recyclable powder usage and minimal environmental footprint
HP 3D HR PA12 FR serves a broad range of industries, including:
- Automotive, for interior components with flame resistance and reduced weight
- Electronics, providing safe and structurally sound enclosures
- Industrial automation and robotics, where it produces durable, electrically insulating parts with precise tolerances
- Railways, for brackets, covers, fasteners, and custom replacement parts within train cabins, thanks to its unique blend of compliance and durability.
Bronze
Aeluma
Wafer-Scale SWIR Photodetector Platform
Aeluma’s wafer-scale SWIR photodetector platform solves one of the most persistent barriers in photonics: how to scale the performance of shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensing without the cost, yield, and volume limitations of traditional materials. By enabling the heterogeneous integration of compound semiconductors on 12-in. silicon wafers, Aeluma brings high-performance SWIR capabilities into the realm of modern, CMOS-compatible semiconductor manufacturing. This breakthrough allows designers and engineers to overcome the scalability bottlenecks of InGaAs grown on InP substrates, which are constrained by high costs, limited availability, and niche fabrication infrastructure.
The company’s novel process delivers a 10x cost reduction, eliminates the need for cryogenic cooling, and achieves industry-leading quantum efficiency across the critical 1 to 2.5 μm range, while supporting monolithic or hybrid integration into standard microelectronics packages. For engineers, the impact is clear: greater design flexibility, reduced power and thermal requirements, and access to scalable, U.S.-based supply for next-gen sensing in a variety of industries, including automotive, mobile, AR/VR, AI, defense, and industrial markets. This is not only a materials breakthrough, but a manufacturing shift.
Aeluma has already secured more than $15 million in contracts from DARPA, NASA, the DoE, and the U.S. Navy to validate the technology across real-world deployments. With a U.S.-based cleanroom and development pipeline, the company is enabling a new wave of photonic integration where performance meets affordability, scale, and sustainability. It’s not just better; it’s transformational for the $8B+ market in silicon photonics, imaging, and next-generation sensing systems.
For the complete list of 2025 LEAP Awards Winners, visit designworldonline.com/2025-leap-awards-winners-are-announced.
Filed Under: LEAP Awards, Materials • advanced
