Interview A spotlight on Sivers Semiconductors
Sivers Semiconductors supplies chips and integrated modules through its two business areas Wireless and Photonics. Wireless develops RF chips and antennas for advanced 5G systems for data and telecommunications networks. Photonics develops and manufactures optical semiconductors for fi ber networks, wireless optical networks and sensors. Following the group’s acquisition of MixComm, Inc, a US challenger in the development of chips for mmWave technology, in October 2021, CIE Magazine sat down with group CEO Anders Storm to discuss what the future holds for Sivers Semiconductors and the communication technology market
Could you tell us more about your journey with the company? Sivers Semiconductors was founded in 1951 but over the last seven to eight years we’ve started a turnaround for the company. I was hired in 2015 as the COO and became the CEO in August 2016. Since then, it’s been a long journey to develop and launch new hardware products. The fi rst design win happened in 2017, which means that a customer picks our 5G chipsets to make their own products, integrating our chip into a network product which they sell to a mobile operator or a wireless internet service provider. The result is that the end customer
Group CEO Anders Storm
gets 5G wireless broadband or fi bre to the home in the photonics case.
We also acquired the photonics company in 2017 and moved to Nasdaq First North. From then, we’ve added 26 design wins in five years and in the photonics space we’ve added two large Fortune 100 customers and for them we’re doing sensors for different applications. The biggest has invested over 10 million USD in the sensor that we are developing for them over the last three years. We expect that this hopefully becomes a volume business in the coming years. It’s long cycles, but once you get in it’s also high walls to keep other people out.
Which market developments are driving innovation at the company? The reason for our existence is based on the big underlying need for more data everywhere. Data consumption is going up and up every year, and according to the Ericsson Mobility Report it’s going to keep growing 30 per cent a year going forward. There are only two technologies today that really support that growth in the future: 5G technology and optical connectivity. Also, the mobile network needs to build out, it needs to bring more fi bre to the home, it needs to bring more data centres which takes care of all the photos and the
videos that we upload, and all the other applications out there. And that’s where we’re going to be.
Instead of sending electricity around the computers, we need to send light instead, because it doesn’t cost as much and it’s also quicker to send. We have a deal with a Californian-based company called Ayar Labs which is now creating what is now called Optical I/O, they will in the future
50 December/January 2022
Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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