A sprint is a focused engagement where your team works with Findest to map, identify, and validate technologies for a specific challenge. In six weeks, you go from an open question to a structured direction backed by evidence.
This page walks you through the scoping phase and the three deliverables your team can generate themselves.
R&D teams hit the same bottleneck. You know the problem, you don't know what technologies exist to solve it, and the ones you do know come from your own industry. The answer often sits somewhere else entirely.
There may be mature technologies in parallel industries that solve your exact problem, often described in terms your team would not think to search for because they fall outside your domain knowledge.
Finding a single option doesn't tell you if it's the right one. You need a view of the full landscape: what exists, how the options compare, and which ones fit your specific requirements.
Manually reviewing papers, patents, and supplier databases to compare technologies against your KPIs is slow work. By the time you've done it properly, the window has moved.
Scoping is where the sprint begins. Findest sits with your team and opens the challenge up, moving from the brief as written to the research plan the sprint will actually run. Customers consistently tell us this conversation is where they get the most unexpected value, because the clarity they walk out with is already a deliverable, even before a single source has been pulled.
In this sprint, the client came in with a narrow version of the question: "Find a better microchannel cold plate for our 3 nm packaging roadmap." Scoping pulled the lens back. The broader aim came out as this: sustain die-level heat flux above 1 kW/cm² without exceeding a 50 °C junction rise, at volumes compatible with a 3 nm production ramp. Same challenge, rephrased to let in any technology that can hit those numbers, not just the ones already on the client's roadmap.
Scoping is also where both sides agree on what's realistic. A sprint runs over six weeks. Your team commits time and domain expertise on one side. Findest commits platform, methodology, and guided support on the other. The scoping conversation names the minimum next step we can both deliver on in that window, and the broader six-week objective we're aiming for.
The underlying goal the technology needs to achieve. Often broader than the original brief.
What the technology has to do, described in neutral terms so we can find solutions from adjacent industries.
Features you want the solution to exhibit. These steer the search toward the right category of answer.
Hard limits the solution must respect. Verified later when we validate each technology against your requirements.
Function-level language is what lets a sprint pull relevant answers from industries the original brief would never have reached into.
Each branch became a search that fed Deliverable 1.
The scoping conversation tells us what shape your sprint needs to take. Here are three common ones.
A team of three to five people works on different angles of one larger topic. Each person takes a branch of the structure tree and runs their own research against it.
Example: "Develop a next-generation thermal interface material for high-power GPU packaging." One person works novel materials (liquid metals, carbon-based composites). One person works the application and curing process at scale. One person works long-term reliability and failure modes under thermal cycling.
A researcher is stuck on a specific problem encountered during experiments and needs a targeted answer. The sprint zooms in on the blocker.
Example: "Which low-k dielectric can survive my current BEOL thermal budget without cracking?" One researcher, one blocker, one set of deliverables focused on that question.
A researcher wants to understand the full landscape of technologies that could solve a single challenge. One topic, one person, one overview deliverable.
Example: "Give me an overview of every approach that can dissipate heat at the die level in advanced logic."
The first deliverable gives your team an overview of the technologies that can meet your requirements. It covers mature options your team already knows about and emerging approaches from adjacent industries that your team may not have looked at before.
The overview is built from peer-reviewed scientific literature and patents. You can trust the source, and every technology in the landscape links back to the original paper or filing. Your team chooses what to read further.
The result is a structured overview, grouped by technology type, with the relevant sources linked to each one.
Results grouped by technology. Each category contains the relevant papers and patents, organized for reading
What this means for your team: Instead of starting from zero, you start from a complete map. You can see which technology categories exist, how many sources support each one, and which areas are most active in current research.
You need to know more about a specific technology. You may have already seen the landscape. You may be going straight to a single approach your team already has its eye on. Either path works.
Your team gathers sources on the technology and asks Findest's platform the questions that matter: how does it work, what are its properties, what does performance look like in practice, where has it been applied. The answer is synthesized from peer-reviewed scientific literature, with every claim traceable to the source.
This is the deliverable for when someone on your team needs to know whether the evidence is there, and what it actually says.
Embedded microchannel cooling integrates fluidic channels directly into the silicon substrate or within the 3D interconnect stack, placing coolant micrometres from transistor junctions. At channel hydraulic diameters of 50–150 µm, laminar flow in water or dielectric coolant enables convective heat transfer coefficients of 40–120 kW/m²·K1,2.
Coolant is distributed through a silicon manifold into parallel channels etched into the die backside. Heat passes through ~100 µm of silicon into the channel wall, where forced convection removes the load3.
Quick Answer: a synthesized overview of technologies with inline [Ref] citations. Every claim traceable to its source
What this means for your team: Your team gets the depth it needs without spending days in the literature. The structured format makes it easy to share findings internally, whether that's in a project review, a decision meeting, or a report to leadership.
Your team has requirements. Performance thresholds, cost constraints, scalability needs, compatibility criteria. Your team can build a requirements table that compares candidate technologies against those parameters side by side, with the data extracted from scientific literature. Each row is a technology. Each column is a parameter that matters to you. The sources behind every data point are linked, so anyone on your team can verify and dig deeper.
This deliverable is typically where a go / no-go decision gets made: which technologies your team should seriously consider, and which ones can be set aside.
| Technology | Max heat flux | Junction ΔT | TRL | Fit vs. KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
SEmbedded microchannel | 1.4kW/cm² 25 | 45°C 2 | TRL 5 | |
STwo-phase immersion | 0.9kW/cm² 7 | 38°C 7 | TRL 7 | |
PArray jet impingement | 1.1kW/cm² 11 | 52°C 11 | TRL 4 | |
SVapour chamber | 0.4kW/cm² 14 | 30°C 14 | TRL 8 | |
SThermoelectric (on-chip) | 0.25kW/cm² 19 | 20°C 19 | TRL 3 |
Results Table: technologies compared side by side on efficiency, methodology, and key parameters. Each data point linked to its source
What this means for your team: You can make an informed go/no-go decision based on structured evidence. No more gut feel. No more "we think this one is better." The comparison is right there, backed by the literature.
A sprint is a focused, six-week engagement. Your team stays in control of the research direction. Findest provides the tools, the methodology, and the guidance.
You and Findest align on your challenge, shape the research question, and configure the search parameters. Your domain expertise steers the direction from day one.
Your team runs guided searches across scientific literature and patent databases, using Findest's platform and methodology. Findest walks alongside you, helping you filter, group, and structure the findings into your deliverables.
Your team reviews the findings, asks follow-up questions, and builds the requirements comparison. You walk away with structured deliverables you can act on internally.
The sprint isn't a report that sits on a shelf. It's structured evidence that feeds directly into your decision-making process.
Every relevant technology, from your industry and adjacent ones, organized by function, with the supporting literature linked.
Structured analysis of the technologies that matter most to your challenge, with working mechanisms and key properties extracted from the literature.
Technologies compared against your specific KPIs, with every data point traceable to its source document.
Evidence-backed recommendations on which technologies to pursue, investigate further, or rule out, so your team can make confident go/no-go decisions.
From sprint to platform: Everything your team discovers during the sprint stays in The Universe, Findest's research platform. When new questions arise weeks or months later, your colleagues can pick up where you left off. The research compounds.
The Universe browser extension. Research your team has already saved is highlighted as you browse, so nobody duplicates work
Book a sprint and get structured, evidence-backed direction for your R&D team in six weeks.
Or reach out to your Findest contact to discuss whether a sprint fits your current research priorities.