Dear partners, iStarChip Semiconductor has successfully completed an angel round financing of nearly 100 million yuan, led by SUNIC Capital Co., Ltd. in this round of financing. This important funding injection will provide strong support for our cutting-edge technology development, product technology upgrades, and high-end talent reserves in the field of automotive grade chips.

iStarChip Semiconductor has always focused on the design of automotive grade chips and provides full scenario chips, basic software, and component solutions, widely used in power, chassis, engine engines, electric motors, area controllers, BMS and other scenarios. So far, we have established a complete team with chip design, automotive software development, and overall solutions, and have conducted in-depth cooperation with top customers.

We plan to launch three series of chips —— entry-level car standard AI MCU, mainstream car standard AI MCU, and high-end motion control processor, which can basically meet the needs of mainstream products on the market. The company’s first entry-level AI MCU product is expected to be officially delivered to customers by the end of 2023. With the help of the world’s most advanced vehicle specification MCU process platform, this product has core advantages such as ultra-high integration, ultra-low power consumption, strong flexibility, and high cost-effectiveness.

In the current rapid development of electrification and intelligence in automobiles, the demand for complete vehicle chips in electric vehicles will be 3-5 times that of traditional fuel vehicles. However, due to the current monopoly of overseas manufacturers in the global automotive MCU market, European, American, and Japanese companies account for nearly 95% of the automotive semiconductor market. Especially for vehicle grade MCU chips, especially in the power field, there are extremely high requirements for reliability and stability. Therefore, in response to this market demand and industry trend, iStarChip Semiconductor is committed to breaking foreign monopolies and filling the gap in domestic car grade functional safety MCU chips.

iStarChip Semiconductor is headquartered in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. It has car safety chip design centers in Silicon Valley, USA and Shanghai, China. It also has car safety software design centers and car safety application design centers in Hangzhou and Guangzhou, respectively. The company has a complete team from front-end to back-end design to production testing, with forward full process design capabilities. In order to facilitate customers to quickly validate products and promote their entry into mass production, we have also developed a complete toolchain, including compilers, emulators, and graphical configuration tools, to provide customers with low-cost chip function verification. Our technical leaders have led and completed the design and mass production of multiple world-class automotive grade chips, with rich experience in developing automotive grade 32-bit MCU products for engine control, safety systems, and power systems.

Stephen Jin, founder and president of iStarChip Semiconductor, pointed out that the automotive core functional safety control chip is a difficult and long-term product direction. We are committed to providing customers with independently controllable chips and reference solutions quickly and safely through innovative business delivery models. After mass production, our products are expected to break the monopoly pattern of foreign enterprises and provide core competitiveness for the Chinese automotive industry. We firmly believe that building the autonomy of Chinese chips is our mission, and we hope that every car running on the land of China can be equipped with iStarChip Semiconductor products as core control components.

Xiong Wei, Senior Partner of SUNIC Capital Co., Ltd., stated that the automotive grade MCU is one of the three major components of automotive chips, with broad market space and rapid growth. The iStarChip team has strong technical capabilities and successful design and mass production experience in this field. The products developed directly benchmark and even surpass the latest generation products of overseas large factories in some aspects, and are expected to become a benchmark enterprise for high-end automotive MCUs in China. We are very optimistic that iStarChip can achieve a breakthrough in localization in this field and achieve the autonomy of the core chip.

Chen Jianqing, Investment Director of SUNIC Capital Co., Ltd., believes that the MCU developed by iStarChip Semiconductor adopts the most advanced automotive grade MCU technology, filling the gap in high-end MCU chips in China and solving the bottleneck problem; The project products will meet the ISO26262 ASIL D functional safety level and can be applied in safety related powertrain, intelligent driving and other fields; Meeting the ISO 21434 level of information security, suitable for the needs of future automotive intelligent networks, networking, and sharing. I hope to assist iStarChip Semiconductor Technology in achieving faster commercialization and soaring in the field of automotive chips.

Through an angel round financing of nearly 100 million yuan, iStarChip Semiconductor will further strengthen its technological research and development capabilities in the field of automotive control chips and actively expand its market share. Looking ahead, iStarChip Semiconductor will continue to make efforts to make greater contributions to technological innovation and development in the Chinese automotive industry.