ADI’s Stata invests in Australia’s Wi-Fi Halow pioneer
The money came from a variety of sources including Analog Devices co-founder and chairman Ray Stata, Blackbird Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures’ CSIRO Innovation Fund, Right Click Capital, Uniseed, Atlas Advisors and the Clean Energy Innovation Fund, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. This follows on from raising A$4.5 million (about US$3.1 million) in seed capital in 2017.
The latest tranche of funding will be used to take the HaLow chips to the mass market and roughly double the head count from 24 to 54 people, the company said in the newspaper article.
Morse claims on its website that its chips are capable of 40Mbps data rates, for single-stream, single-antenna products using channel widths varying between 1, 2, 4 and 8MHz, and of up to 80Mbps when using an optional 16MHz channel width. The technology trades off the higher speeds of traditional Wi-Fi for the power efficiency of its protocol and the ability to penetrate buildings and walls.
Morse Micro was founded by co-CEOs Andrew Terry and Michael De Nil in 2016. Terry was previously Wi-Fi radio lead for Broadcom and had previously worked for Wolfson Microelectronics and Dialog Semiconductor. De Nil also previously worked at Broadcom – as a principal IC design engineer – and prior to that conducted research into low-power application-specific instruction set processors at the IMEC research institute in Belgium.
Morse Micro reportedly has a close relationship with Cisco Inc. which is expected to ship products based on ICs from Morse Micro.
Related links and articles:
White paper on HaLow power consumption
News articles:
Morse Micro preps chips for HaLow IoT
IoT processor beats Cortex-M, claims startup
Complete low-power Wi-Fi HaLow radio for IoT
Amazon backs battery-free IoT startup Wiliot