CEO interview: Building a European sensor unicorn
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Nanusens has big plans in the consumer business. It has designed a micromachined MEMS accelerometer that can be built on a low cost, standard CMOS process, and crowdfunded the development of the first silicon for the sensor.
The sensor is aimed at providing controls via tapping for earbuds and has been built at SMIC in China, although the technology can be used on any CMOS process. This is a key advantage that will drive large volumes quickly, says founder and CEO Dr Josep Montanyà.
“My bet is three to five years to reach $1bn in sales,” saidJosep,“We are going into a market that is dominated by reference designs – there are five ear bud reference designs, and in mobile phones there are two. So either you have significant market share or you have nothing, We have something that is unique is size and performance, especially when you go to combination devices, itsa 30成本优势的百分比和市场最小的一半，比其他市场小十倍。”
The company crowdfunded the development of the first silicon and is now looking for more investment, hence the bullish outlook. But this is not his first rodeo, as the saying goes.
他于2003年在西班牙巴塞罗那创立了鲍拉布微型系统，以开发大学研究的低压RF转换。
“我获得了300,000欧元的最初资金，并建立了鲍洛阿布，并在两年后提供了样品。我们向美国的一系列公司展示了这些公司，并意识到我的教授是错误的，并且没有需求。问题是成本，大小，产量和与CMO的整合。因此，在2005年，重点变为集中于MEMS，在特定的制造过程上，但后来我意识到我们需要将MEMS转移到CMO中。对此进行了很多研究，但没有人能够将其带入批量制造。最后，很明显，最好的方法是使用蒸气HF蚀刻氧化硅，但面临的挑战是如何使用那些从未打算成为MEMS一部分的金属层。我们仍在尝试开发RF开关，但挑战是联系。
“然后，在2010年，我们意识到我们有一个可用于非接触设计的MEMS流程，并迅速移动到了指南针的概念证明。我们接近在2012年将指南针发布到市场上，但是我们的主要投资者在公司中的工作时间太长，因此投资基金不得不在十年后将钱退还给投资者，因此他们想在未来两年内出售鲍拉布人。有收购投资的报价，但他们拒绝了一切，再加上他们在基金方面的思考，最终该公司于2014年关闭。
“几个月后，我设置了纳米森。我学到的第一堂课是不允许单个投资者控制公司的50％以上，以避免您拥有出色技术，但公司需要关闭的情况。”
“我们最初做工程服务和提高seed funding in 2016 with three investors from Barcelona and the Netherlands. So in 2016 I could start again but the specs for a compass had increased so that wasn’t feasible so we focussed on an accelerometer for the first product.”
“My experience is its not easy to raise funds for semiconductors. Semiconductor startups are tough, especially in the beginning. Now we have silicon working I think it will be different and now I am having interesting conversations with funds,” he said.
The crowdfunding, and the associated tax break, called EIS, also led to setting up the company in the UK.
“除了最初的投资，今天的大部分资金都是商业天使，这就是为什么在2018年我们建立了众筹，我们已经与CrowdCube进行了四轮。拥有1400名投资者，但大多数是联合组织的 - 我们有10,000英镑的投资，因此我们可能有100名直接投资者。大多数来自英国，因此此举。”他说。
“In 2018 I wanted to try the crowdfunding funding – you can do that from Spain, but it happened that we were not getting to the target and I looked at other companies that were successful and the common factor was EIS. So I set up the legal structure in the UK and when you apply for EIS the funding was complete in a few days and we started overfunding.”
“With the larger investors we go direct and this gives us connections with potential customers in lots of different industries,” he said. “With IoT for example there’s applications in building, retail, lots of things.”
“We don’t discount using crowdfunding going forwards but the larger rounds are more challenging. We raised £1m then £2m on Crowdcube, now we are looking for $6m. It could be doable but we want to explore the corporate investors. The difference is we have the silicon and most of the business angels can’t help with that – corporate VC in semiconductor can assess the due diligence.”
The company set up in Torbay in the southwest of the UK.
“Then we had to subsidiarise the Spanish company and after two years started to set up the real structure. Initially we had the HQ in London as the legal structure, and then we started looking at options and there was a lot of support from Torbay. They had a small clean room and electron microscope, and half my time I live in Paignton and we are in process of staffing up and looking for people.”
尽管专注于MEMS加速度计传感器，但原始的低压RF开关也已成为可行的产品。
“Every time we tape out a silicon run we add something and last year we got a big surprise with our RF switch for consumer and it was working very well for the reliability, beyond one billion cycles without an issue so we decided to promote the switch in parallel,” he said. “This is a capacitive switch rather than ohmic and talking to customers for antenna tuners we realised we had to change the name to the digital tunable capacitor (DTC). We have both devices in silicon with the mechanical part tested, now we are adding the electronics and will sample the RF DTC by end of June and later for the accelerometer. We plan to start volume production next year so we need Series A to fund that.”
“我们使用4到6层的180nm工艺，因此我们使用SMIC的所有金属层，我们提供了非常好的服务，我们计划将其用于量产量。大多数我们的客户将是中文，但我们处于CMO中，因此作为计划的一部分，我们将需要第二种采购，因为所有客户都想要。这是我们去其他铸造厂甚至其他节点的美妙之处之一。我们还在Globalfouldries和Lfoundry进行了测试。”
“For lower nodes with larger metal layers it would be possible to place the MEMS on top and that’s an interesting future for what we have and we are designed to go to lower nodes.”
“Next year we should start delivering samples for more products. It has taken time for us to solve some important challenges on yield and the inner structures, but now to move to the next products a lot of what we have is the same. We are also in talking with semiconductor companies to embed the sensor into their chips for motion detection in an MCU, there’s lots of possibilities there – that’s IP.
“我们可以去许多市场，但我们的重点是消费者，在消费者中，大小以及功耗和成本最重要。我们在那里最大的不同。对于汽车和其他市场，我们通过IP看到更多。”他说。“Initially our focus is on product and secondly on IP. This gives us a lot of revenue short term and reinforces the IP business.”
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