(Reporter Cai Haoshang) On May 7, KunYou Optoelectronics, a company focusing on wafer-level optical chips, announced the completion of the A2 round of financing, which was co-invested by Yuan Jing Capital, Walden International and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)'s fund, China Science and Technology Innovation Star (CSTS). KunYou Optoelectronics has previously received several rounds of financing from Sunny Optics, KunZhong Capital, Morning Glory Venture Capital, and Zhongheng Starlight.
Founded in 2016, KunYou Optoelectronics is a high-tech enterprise focusing on the research, development and application of wafer-level optical chips, and is committed to exploring the integration of semiconductor processes and optical processes to design and make nanoscale, low-cost optical chips with semiconductor wafer thinking. With the complete design, plate making, scale production and testing closed loop, KunYou Optoelectronics will play an important role in 3D imaging and unmanned driving, AR/MR display, 5G optical communication link, medical imaging, automatic security and other fields which are hot in the market nowadays.
According to Dr. Liu Yiran, partner of Yuanjing Capital and a doctor of optoelectronics, the wafer-level manufacturing of optical chips makes the photonic technology, which has been on the back burner, enter the consumer field, and will trigger a series of incremental scenarios of demand from the short-term to the long-term. It can be predicted that in the next three years, the consumer-level applications of machine vision represented by the three demands of depth sensing, AR, and unmanned driving will take the lead in the development; in the medium and long term, photonics will gradually penetrate into the computing link, triggering more far-reaching changes in machine intelligence applications.
Walden International partner, many years of semiconductor experience, said Wang Lin, along with Moore's law to the limit, the development of semiconductor integrated circuits is drawing a perfect & ldquo; S curve & rdquo; approaching the ceiling. & ldquo; integrated light & rdquo; replace & ldquo; integrated electricity & rdquo; will be an irreversible change. Retrospectively, the development of semiconductor chips, & ldquo; nanoscale & rdquo; and & ldquo; scale low cost & rdquo; are the two main features of integrated circuit technology. Similarly, wafer-level optics makes it possible for optics to increase precision by an order of magnitude while decreasing cost by an order of magnitude, which in turn makes the commercial value of optical chips possible.
As for the team, the core R&D team and management of KunYou Optoelectronics come from professors and PhDs from Stanford University, University of Rochester, University of Cambridge, Zhejiang University and other optoelectronic institutes; and former executives from Microsoft, NASA, Fortis Fiber Optics, Sorepak, McKinsey, and other international companies. At present, the first phase of the production line will be completed in May this year, when it will realize the scale mass production of diffractive optical chips DOE, light field display optical waveguide, high-speed optical communication links and other wafer-level optical chip products. As an extremely cross cutting-edge field, through this round of financing, the company has constructed a perfect network of organizations in optics, semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, well-known venture capital funds, etc., and the collaborative layout has been gradually improved.
