Silicon Integrated Raises $25M in Round B

I missed this announcement in June 2020. Chinese ToF sensor company Silicon Integrated raised a RMB180M ($25.28M) series B round of financing led by CTC Capital.

Silicon Integrated develops ToF sensor chips and 3D vision solutions, and has already launched mature products. In March 2020, the company has released a BSI ToF sensor chip with independent intellectual property rights. The chip can be widely used in smartphones, face recognition, machine vision and other scenes which require high-performance 3D sensing and imaging effects.

Zhang Xingchen, partner at Source Code Capital, said: "3D sensor chips and modules represented by ToF are becoming a new generation of technological infrastructure. Unlike traditional chip design companies, Silicon Integrated has the ability to define and differentiate hardware through software algorithms, which will promote them to stand out in this field."

Proceeds of the round will be used to expand mass production of BSI ToF products, and the development of lidar, optical sensing and multi-sensing fusion technologies.

The company's first ToF product family SIF2X10 features:

• HVGA (480 x 360) resolution for SIF2310 and VGA (640 x 480) resolution for SIF2610
• Back-side illumination
• Ambient light immunity
• Compatible with 850nm/940nm LED/VCSEL light source
• QE>30% at 940nm
• Up to 100MHz modulation frequency
• 240fps raw data frame rate
• Region of interest (ROI) function
• Absolute accuracy < 1% up to 5m
• Global shutter
• Opto-package

Silicon Integrated presents a set of pictures (raw data without correction and processing) taken by SIF2310 with a 940nm light source, an average light source power of 140mw, and a target distance of 2m:

According to South China Morning Post, Silicon Integrated's co-founders Rui Quan and CEO Liu Deheng studied engineering at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and both landed jobs at Dutch semiconductor companies after graduating.

Liu worked as a research engineer for Philips in Eindhoven for two years while Quan was a senior analogue design engineer at NXP Semiconductors for four years.