Infineon partners with Chinese-American radio sensor startup
The partnership includes an automotive electronics suppy startup, ThinkSeed Systems Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore, India) founded in 2021.
MKSemi was founded in 2019 by engineers with UWB experience under the catchphrase “radio is a sensor.” The company is looking to launch high-precision location and direction finding for smartphones, wearables, IoT and the automotive market. The company has offices in San Jose California and in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen in China.
The company has announced the closing of a $12.8 million round of investment led by Chinese investors. Backers of the firm include mobile phone maker Oppo, Lightspeed China Partners, Qiming Venture Partners, Ivy Capital, Gaorong Capital, SVTech Ventures, CFT Capital and iCamp Capital.
The company has also announced its first product, the MK8000 system-on-a-chip for location and direction-finding. The MK8000 consumes 43mA at 3V in receive mode, which MKSemi claims is half that of other UWB chips on the market. The SoC includes a signal processor to keep computation local and reducing power consumption.
MKSemi and Infineon Technologies have agreed to develop a system design that incorporate the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) MCU from Infineon Technologies with the MK8000 SoC. ThinkSeed Systems will take the combined design to add application software and qualify it for industrial and automotive markets. Since Bluetooth LE and UWB coexist and complement each other, using the two technologies creates an enhanced solution for spatial awareness.
The company’s CEO and co-founder is Yifeng Zhang, who has acquired experience with AMS and NXP as a senior engineer and spent ten years with Quintic Corp. rising to the position of CTO.
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