Hanwei Microelectronics Closes Pre-A Strategic Round, Low-Power Team Targets UWB High-Precision Positioning Market
UWB technology will become an important foundational technology for the era of the intelligent Internet of Everything.
On December 30, 2020, Hanwei Microelectronics (hereinafter "Hanwei"), a UWB chip design company, announced the completion of a Pre-A funding round worth tens of millions of RMB. The round was led by OPPO, with MediaTek, Gaorong Ventures, and others participating.
Founded in 2019, Hanwei is led by several seasoned experts in mixed-signal design and focuses on the development of UWB chips and solutions.
Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology originated in the 1960s. By leveraging extremely large bandwidth, it enables high-speed data transmission at low power spectral density. The ultra-high temporal resolution afforded by UWB's massive bandwidth allows for highly precise distance and position measurement. Since September of the previous year, high-precision positioning capabilities and applications based on UWB technology began entering the mainstream consumer electronics space, with giants like Apple and Samsung integrating UWB into smartphones, smartwatches, smart speakers, and phone accessories. In the near future, as UWB finds applications in smartphones, smart hardware, and IoT, the industry is poised for explosive growth.
Hanwei's core team hails primarily from the former Quintic Microelectronics, supplemented by professionals from other companies, and possesses world-leading low-power design expertise. The Quintic team developed the world's lowest-power BLE chip in 2014, and the company was acquired by NXP in 2015 — making it one of the few domestic semiconductor firms to be successfully bought out by an overseas chip giant. Dr. Yifeng Zhang, Hanwei's Chairman and CEO, was a co-founder, CTO, and board director at Quintic Microelectronics, with over 20 years of semiconductor industry experience, having held senior positions at Philips, NXP, and ams AG. Dr. Xuechu Li, Vice President of Engineering, brings 15 years of semiconductor experience and is an expert in analog and RF integrated circuit design. Chief Architect Mr. Gaddam is an internationally recognized expert in wireless communications and one of the principal technical contributors to the MBOA-UWB international alliance standard.
The Hanwei team also has years of accumulated expertise in high-precision positioning. In the course of market outreach, they recognized both strong customer demand for high-precision positioning technology and the limitations of existing solutions for such applications. "We realized that across various indoor application scenarios, UWB technology could deliver more accurate and stable high-precision positioning. So we decided to focus on UWB and commit to expanding its large-scale application across IoT domains," said Zhang.
Currently, the Hanwei team is fully dedicated to UWB chip design and development, aiming to bring to market high-performance, high-precision, highly integrated UWB chips capable of running on button-cell batteries — for diverse applications including smartphones, wearables, smart IoT terminals, and industry-specific devices. The company expects its first chip to enter mass production in 2021.
Zhang believes that the IoT ecosystem centered on smartphones — encompassing smartwatches, smart speakers, smart home devices — along with the new energy vehicle sector, will be the primary arenas for UWB's explosive growth in coming years. Location-based services leveraging high-precision positioning will be the main driver of UWB technology development. UWB will become a foundational technology for the era of intelligent, interconnected everything. At the same time, UWB-based high-precision positioning holds enormous potential in industrial applications, with significant prospects in warehouse management, logistics, production automation, healthcare, and the precise tracking of personnel, equipment, and goods in factories and mines.
According to market projections, UWB chip shipments will reach 3 billion units by 2025. "This estimate comes from mainstream chip vendors, phone makers, and IoT companies involved in setting UWB standards, based on their own market assessments," Zhang explained. "The UWB market is still in its infancy. Hanwei has low-power, high-performance mixed-signal design technology and an experienced, dynamic team. We look forward to working with partners to develop the IoT high-precision positioning market together."
A Gaorong Ventures project lead commented: "Apple's inclusion of the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 showed us the tremendous potential of the centimeter-level precision positioning era arriving for IoT. Hanwei has a team with many years of experience in chip R&D and market operations, which demonstrated outstanding capabilities during the intensely competitive early days of Bluetooth. With the support of several ecosystem-leading enterprises, we are very optimistic about the Hanwei team's future in the UWB chip space."
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