Himax Invests in Emza Visual Sense

GlobeNewsWire: Himax makes a strategic investment in cash in exchange for a 45.1% equity ownership of Emza Visual Sense Ltd. (“Emza”), with a one-year option to acquire the remaining 54.9% of Emza’s equity and all outstanding stock options. Purchase price to acquire the remaining equity and all outstanding stock options of Emza if Himax elects to exercise the one-year option includes an all-cash initial purchase amount, along with earnout payments contingent on the performance of Emza. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Emza is an Israeli company developing a power-efficient visual sensors that include proprietary machine-vision algorithms and specific architectures that deliver always-on visual sensing capabilities, achieving orders of magnitude improvement in power consumption.

“This strategic investment in Emza compliments our previously announced ultra low power CMOS image sensor product and initiatives in delivering turn-key solutions for ‘always-on’ smart camera that enables devices capable of real-time contextual awareness, such as face detection and human presence detection and motion,” said Jordan Wu, CEO of Himax. “Together, we can transform our AoS sensor from a simple ‘image capturing device’ to an ‘information analytics device’ that offers significantly more value to our customers. This exciting new computer vision market demands highly efficient sensors, algorithms, camera and processor architectures capable of delivering extremely low power consumption in a small form factor so that it can be easily integrated into TVs and smartphones, as well as AR/VR, IoT, and AI devices.”

“Our partnership with Himax, who shares our vision of sub-milliwatt always-on visual sensors, provides Emza with access to a unique technology of ultra low-power CMOS and semi-conductors,” said Yoram Zylberberg, CEO of Emza. “Achieving the breakthrough of advanced computer vision at ultra low-power consumption requires tight integration between the silicon and algorithms. Our partnership with Himax gives us the opportunity to efficiently achieve and commercialize these breakthroughs.”

GlobeNewsWire: A week ago, Emza announced a partnership with DSP Group on low power vision processing. DSP Group is known by its low power always-on voice processors for smartphones ("OK Google"-type).