WiSpry closes additional $10 million
Cell phone chip developer raises funds to ramp up production
WiSpry, a developer of programmable RF semiconductor products for the wireless industry, says it has closed an additional $10 million of Series C financing, bringing the total round to $20 million. The round was led by Chart Venture Partners and Acadia Woods Partners. Investors from the previous round include Paladin Capital and Murata.
The Irvine, Ca., based company says its technology address the inevitable fact that carriers are eventually going to expand into new frequency bands, often with new differentiated services in each. These could range from VoIP to broadband services like WiMAX. WiSpry’s technology allows phone developers to integrate low-loss, tunable RF components so they can communicate with these frequency bands.
Last year, WiSpry said it was working with one of the largest cell phone manufacturers in the world. That’s as far as the details went – WiSpry would not disclose which one.
It seems WiSpry has plenty of business lined up and it's ready to make use of the investment quickly. The company said it will use the funding to expand the company’s operations, engineering and applications support structure as it begins production shipments to wireless handset OEMs and ODMs this summer. Russ Garcia, CEO of WiSpry said, “This investment aligns well with our ramp-to-volume production plan as we are moving forward with the productization of our first products and as we have customer commitments now in place for new product developments slated for 2010 production and beyond."
Founded in 2004, WiSpry has raised almost $50 million in VC funding to date.
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WiSpry is a fabless RF semiconductor company that has developed truly disruptive technology for the wireless market. WiSpry brings significant performance improvement as well as size and cost reduction potential to mobile handset manufacturers and network operators through on-chip integration of dynamically tunable RF elements into mobile handset front-end circuits.
The key to WiSpry's technology is the integration of patented RF- micro-electro-mechanical–systems (MEMS) devices with industry standard RF-CMOS process flows, thereby enabling convergence of digital, analog, RF and MEMS functionality on a single chip.
This integration enables WiSpry’s very high performance tunable MEMS digital capacitors to take advantage of the latest advancements in logic and RF-CMOS processes bringing together substantial performance benefits at a cost point that leverages the large fabless CMOS manufacturing infrastructure.
Key benefits and value validated by top-tier mobile handset manufacturers include:
Up to 3 dB in RF performance gain with resulting increase in talk-time and battery life as well as reduced demand on network infrastructure due to improved receiver sensitivity
Reduction in the number of required antennas in multi-band handset platforms
Multiple week reduction in RF design cycle time and the ability to develop a software-tunable RF platform that can be appled towards multiple mobile handset platforms with only minor software changes.
Customers developing increasingly complex multi-band and multi-standard mobile phone platforms can now take advantage of the superior performance enabled by high-performance, tunable MEMS technology at a cost point that is consistent with the mainstream semiconductor industry. WiSpry's software programmable front-end products can greatly simplify the schematic and layout of the multi-band mobile phone design while at the same time save space and improve the RF-performance.