Indie buys Silicon Radar for occupancy monitoring

Business news | February 23, 2023

By Peter Clarke

Indie Semiconductor Inc. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.) has acquired Silion Radar GmbH (Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Germany) for an undisclosed sum of money.

Indie is a NASDAQ-listed automotive component supplier and the acquisition provides automotive radar chip design capability. The move complements previous acquisitions of Analog Devices’ and On Semi’s radar divisions.

Indie added that the acquisition accelerates its automotive radar roadmap and will provide it with the industry’s first production-ready 120GHz radar.

Silicon Radar was founded in 2006 and was a fabless chip company that designed and delivered silicon chips for radar distance and speed measurement, health care, sense and avoidance systems or obstacle detection.

120GHz, 140GHz

Using 120GHz for in-cabin sensing and 140GHz for external sensing allows antenna-on-chip techniques, enabling complete radar-on-a-chip. Reducing the cost of in-cabin Occupant Monitoring Systems, or OMS, through simpler PCB layouts in particular could speed deployment.

“Indie’s acquisition of Silicon Radar furthers our technology leadership in automotive radar applications, particularly with the industry’s first production-ready 120 GHz solution and immediately extends our capabilities with the addition of a world-class design team in Europe,” said Donald McClymont, Indie’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

In the same statement, Anja Bölicke, CEO of Silicon Radar, said: “By combining our core technologies with Indie’s global sales channels and demonstrated scalability, we can accelerate our time to market and better capitalize on the global radar market opportunity.”