From Lab Bench to Marketplace

Morphorm's Journey from Sandia Innovation to Industry Impact

The Challenge

Albuquerque, NM – September 2025 – Additive manufacturing has revolutionized what is possible in engineering design by enabling the use of advanced geometries and materials that were once considered impossible. However, design technologies have not kept pace with these advanced manufacturing capabilities. Engineers needed better tools to quickly optimize component geometry across thermal, mechanical, and fluid domains well before investing in costly physical prototypes.

The Solution

Sandia National Laboratories addressed this gap by developing Plato software, an open-source engineering design library created to meet national mission needs for agile component and system design. Built on Sandia’s portfolio of open-source technologies, Plato supports multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization on high-performance computing platforms.

Its Multiple-Program, Multiple Data (MPMD) framework enables concurrent design explorations, facilitating across multiple environments while accounting for inherent uncertainty due to manufacturing and material variability, e.g., design under uncertainty, in a computationally efficient manner. This computationally efficient approach empowers engineers to:

Modify component geometry and material layout to meet complex design specifications
Simulate and optimize multiple engineering requirements simultaneously
Reduce development time and costs by minimizing reliance on physical prototypes
Tackle the increasing complexity of modern engineering challenges

The Innovator

Dr. Miguel Aguilo, a former Sandia computer scientist and co-developer of Plato, recognized the software’s transformative potential across government and industry. While Plato is open-source and freely available, its sophistication and steep learning curve created significant barriers to adoption without expert guidance.

Driven by his passion for solving real-world engineering challenges and bringing advanced engineering simulation and optimization technologies to industry, Dr. Aguilo made the bold decision to leave Sandia and found Morphorm, an advanced engineering software company dedicated to commercializing and extending these capabilities.

The foundational technologies in Plato stem from Sandia's contribution to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Transformative Design (TRADES) program, which advanced foundational mathematics and algorithms for managing and accelerating modern design workflows. As principal investigator for Sandia’s TRADES team, Dr. Aguilo led the development and open-source release of Plato. As he collaborated closely with program partners, he recognized the strong demand for advanced simulation-driven design tools across multiple sectors.

Strategic Focus

Morphorm is initially targeting semiconductor and defense applications, including solar panels, computer chips, and hypersonics. For instance, as the U.S. Department of Energy is seeking to extend the lifespan of solar panels from 30 to 50 years. Achieving this goal requires reducing degradation rates by optimizing critical parameters such as cell material, size, and metallization layout. This means solar manufacturers will need simulation-driven design software capable of optimizing these interdependent factors, exactly what Morphorm is building, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. This generative design example demonstrates the use of adjoint-based methods to enhance the electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance of Ga2O3 Schottky diodes by optimizing the material layout within the device envelope. Gradient-based optimization determines the optimal spatial distribution of Aluminum Nitride (AlN) and Platinum (Pt) within a 5 μm material layer. A mass budget of 30% (leftmost), 32.5% (middle), and 35% (rightmost) is imposed on the Pt phase, with the junction temperature constrained to a maximum of 360 K. The optimizer identified material layouts that satisfy both the mass budget and thermal constraints while maximizing device power density. Each generative design study, evaluating coupled thermal, electrical, and mechanical performance, completed 100 optimization iterations in 58 minutes on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. — *Figure 1.* *This generative design example demonstrates the use of adjoint-based methods to enhance the electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance of Ga*₂O₃ Schottky diodes by optimizing the material layout within the device envelope. Gradient-based optimization determines the optimal spatial distribution of Aluminum Nitride (AlN) and Platinum (Pt) within a 5 μm material layer. A mass budget of 30% (leftmost), 32.5% (middle), and 35% (rightmost) is imposed on the Pt phase, with the junction temperature constrained to a maximum of 360 K. The optimizer identified material layouts that satisfy both the mass budget and thermal constraints while maximizing device power density. Each generative design study, evaluating coupled thermal, electrical, and mechanical performance, completed 100 optimization iterations in 58 minutes on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.

Semiconductor devices face similar challenges. Leading-edge chips have similar software requirements and require enormous investment. For example, in 2018, development costs exceeded $540 million for 5nm and $1 billion for 3nm nodes, with nearly 40% of these costs attributed to verification processes such as modeling and simulation. Therefore, a 10%-20% reduction in verification costs through faster, automated, simulation-driven design workflows could save $100-$200 million over the lifecycle of a single design project.

Morphorm is confident in its ability to deliver technologies that automate simulation-driven design workflows, reduce prototyping costs, accelerate time-to-market, and improve performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of next-generation semiconductor and defense systems.

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About Morphorm

Morphorm® is an emerging leader in engineering simulation and modeling technologies. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Morphorm is advancing state-of-the-art optimization and simulation technologies to drive product innovation in clean energy, semiconductors, and defense. The company’s pioneering real-time design solutions are setting new industry benchmarks in performance and efficiency.

Morphorm

Redefining Simulation. Empowering Innovation.