Startup seed funding for low-power chips for phased array antennas
To develop low-power microchips for the next generation of phased array antennas, Oso Semiconductor has raised an oversubscribed $5.2 million seed round, led by Engine Ventures with Entrada Ventures, Berkeley SkyDeck and J-Ventures also participating.
The funds will be used to build pre-production beamforming chipsets and evaluation systems for initial customers in the satellite communications (SATCOM) market. After that, these hardware platforms will be leveraged to secure additional customer commitments across SATCOM, 5G and radar applications using phased array anatennas..
Phased arrays with electrically steerable antennas (ESAs) increase bandwidth and enhance point-to-point signal quality, improving wireless data transmission and enabling radar and other sensors to track multiple moving targets. However, the high cost and power consumption required of ESA chipsets are hindering growth for crucial applications, including satellite payloads, which are projected to represent a USD 11.3 billion market by 2026, and the planned building and launch of 38,000 new satellites by 2033.
“One of the biggest challenges for the SATCOM market is the high cost of ESAs, and estimates indicate that wireless microchips represent the bulk of those high costs and steep power consumption,” said Dr. Matthew Anderson, founder and CEO of Oso Semiconductor. “Our novel chip design will enable products to provide up to 4x improvement in efficiency compared to existing ESAs, and allow manufacturers and integrated satellite operators to put more antennas on an access point while consuming less power — meaning they can serve more data and generate more revenue.”
Founded in 2022 and spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, Oso Semiconductor has developed novel beamforming circuit technology with a fraction of the losses of conventional approaches — inspired by Dr. Anderson’s work in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. Oso Semiconductor has devised new algorithmic approaches to phase shifting and combining, enabling a simplified chip design with fewer amplifiers. The patent-pending beamformers, featuring a unique Combiner-First™ architecture, provide significant power and cost savings for any phased array antennas used for SATCOM, 5G and radar systems, especially those operating at microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies above 6 GHz.
“Thanks to insatiable demand for communications bandwidth, ESAs could soon become ubiquitous in all wireless systems, but we desperately need improvements in power, size and weight to support more rapid commercial adoption,” said Reed Sturtevant, General Partner, at Engine Ventures. “Oso Semiconductor’s cost- and power-effective microchips bring unprecedented efficiency and simplicity to phased array systems, and have the potential to dramatically accelerate the communication and sensing landscape.”
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