And market pull implies marketing, which means promotion of the brand name XeThru for the ultrawide band radar (see UWB radar modules sense respiration in next room).
It also means the company is moving up the food chain slightly and using its X2 transceiver IC as a building block for multiple application-specific radar modules. It can then build-in application-specific software to make design-in easier for end-user facing customers AND try and extract value for the chip based on the end use.
It could also mean that just offering the X2 transceiver, as Novelda has been doing for a year, has not proved such an easy sell. But with $12 million of investment just raised Novelda has created for itself some "runway" to develop more modules and even a next-generation CMOS radar IC.
The module-based approach also gives Novelda many opportunities to gain a significant market win; they just have to do a bit more of the engineering. The opportunities are clearly broad from consumer to the smart-home to the smart-city, in the automobile and on to health and medical applications.
With the successful Bogen at the helm Novelda is worth keeping an eye not least because it is likely he would not be averse to a company sale if the price was right.
One can imagine the technology ending up in the hands of a Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, NXP/Freescale or STMicroelectronics. But then again there may be South Korean or Chinese chip companies that would value the technology and Novelda’s European engineers more highly.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
UWB radar modules sense respiration in next room
Novelda has second-generation CMOS radar chip
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