ChipON's officials claim that this financing aims to ramp up R&D in vehicle performance chips applying to ASIL-D rated multi-core MCU products for automotive engines, domain controller applications, radiofrequency and Ethernet.
Shanghai-based ChipON Micro-Electronica announced on March 10 that it has secured a CNY 300 million Series B. This was led by different ventures, including China Fortune-Tech Capital and SAIC Hengxue, with Winsoul Capital serving as the financial consultant.
Founded by Xiaobing Ding in 2012, ChipON is a vehicle manufacturer producing automotive and industrial grade mixed-signal 8-bit MCU and 32-bit MCU & DSP chips. The company also developed independent MCU cores with a fully-integrated system.
ChipON's two major automotive-grade chips, KF8A and KF32A, have achieved extensive coverage from 8-bit to 32-bit in automotive electronics. These two chips have passed AEC-Q100 automotive quality certification and are used in various scenarios, including body control, automotive power and safety and intelligent cockpit systems. Also, these chips have accomplished mass commercialization in the automotive front-end market.
Xiaobing Ding indicated that the company will continue to engage in the automotive electronics and semiconductor fields by focusing on the R&D process of automotive electronic components. Its aim is to provide the automotive market with safe, reliable and stable automotive-grade chips while facilitating industrial upgrading and diversifying intelligent solutions.
As the leading investor in this financing, Zhu Jiachun, a partner of SAIC Hengxu, said, "ChipON is one of the few MCU chip design companies in China that has its own IP core processor. The company has shipped more than hundreds of millions of chips in total. For the current Chinese automotive industry chain, we are lacking the core technology to produce chips, because our Chinese enterprises are not fully competent in the independent R&D process of producing automotive-grade chips. This strategic cooperation will further promote the R&D and implementation of ChipON’s automotive-grade chip technology with SAIC's background. This financing is expected to overturn the long-term monopoly of foreign giants in automotive-grade chips in China’s automotive industry."