Interview
transmit data in the computer with light instead of electricity, saving up to 90 per cent of the power needed and dramatically increasing speeds within the computer between the CPUs.
You also have all these different verticals, such as transport and healthcare, which will create interesting new opportunities as well. We’re not just selling 5G chips for fixed wireless access, but also for track-to-train applications, where you can get reliable wireless broadband connectivity at several gigabits per second on high-speed trains. We have customers testing applications for autonomous buses and automotive connectivity in Japan and the UK. Others have built meshed small cell networks to transmit data from Wi-Fi hotspots like Ontix in London.
The fixed wireless access (FWA) market will also be growing a lot in the high mmWave 5G bands in the future. FWA has been around using different cellular technologies but is now growing especially in the unlicensed mmWave band where we see ADTRAN, Cambium Networks in the licensed bands, and others moving into mmWave as well.
ADTRAN is a large fibre company today but will be using their extension portfolio to add wireless broadband links. They have 68 different countries where they have customers with a lot of different operators. Cambium have 17,000 service providers that are buying products and 10,000 channel partners. The growth that’s going to come is going to get bigger we think because of all of this.
Since joining Sivers Semiconductors, how have things changed in the electronic components industry and have there been any surprises? The biggest surprise was the pandemic and that, of course, has been diffi cult to grasp. But in general, I think the market has developed quite as I expected. I’ve been in this industry a long time, and you must always look forward and ask where is the market going to go? Why is the market going where it’s going? And what are the overall needs? But it has also developed into more things than I thought. I wasn’t expecting that we would connect trains the way we do today, or autonomous buses. I thought it was more going to be 5G handsets, space stations, fixed wireless access, but there are so many new things. We have a design win with Siemens Healthineers which is exploring how to use our chipsets
www.cieonline.co.uk
in healthcare products to be able to move data really quickly, so there’s a lot of new things coming up.
One thing that we’ve always said is that the market always takes longer but always becomes bigger than you think. So that’s what I think is happening right now.
Did the pandemic create any challenges and/or opportunities for your company and the wider industry?
The opportunities are that we have been able to work all over the world, with less travel, and thanks to digital technology physical distance has not been a big issue, like with West Coast US for example. We haven’t had a presence there yet, (we will now with the MixComm acquisition) but it’s been easier to win business on the other side of the pond, so to speak.
The negative thing has been that everyone has had the increased need for more data to the home because we’ve all been working from home and doing video
conferencing. If you have the technology and the technology is already rolled out, the demand has increased. If, however, the technology is on the brink of getting into the market, like ours, these are things that don’t happen in a pandemic. The developments into connected trains, for example, there are now reduced numbers of people travelling on trains, so all of those things have been moved forward. In that perspective we have been losing both time and money from our customers but we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We’ve also been losing time because we have a technology that is not yet fully verifi ed and tested and it needs network approvals, and that has not been a priority for the operators during the pandemic either.
What are your ambitions for Sivers Semiconductors going forward? One key part of our strategy is the right acquisitions adding capabilities to Sivers.
MixComm is the second acquisition we have made over the past four years. MixComm already has design wins, within Satcom and 5G base stations. Satcom is going to be the next big high-frequency mmWave market where we also will offer products. In the future we see companies like Starlink that Elon Musk is building, and Amazon with their Kuiper network, who are going to build communication out in space.
Also going forward, you have the next generation – 6G. Even if it’s hard to fathom that now, it’s going to be with us in eight to 10 years. 6G is going to be 10x even more higher data speeds, it’s going to be lower latencies. We’re already looking at those technologies for the future. The funny thing is that it’s working in our favour that all of these things need to happen at higher and higher frequencies where it’s harder and harder to do good RF design. The reason is in that frequency range you can actually have this wide bandwidth that can send all of the data you need to send. When you’re going to do 40 gigabits per second in the air or 100 gigabits then you need a broad and wide band to be able to do it. All the bands where you have 4G and 3G are completely full with what we have today, so they need to move upwards and onwards with 6G as well, and that’s going to fit us perfectly.
From a company perspective, we’re a mid-cap company today on Nasdaq Stockholm, to get to large cap we need to 2x our current market cap and we aim to get there in
the future.
www.sivers-semiconductors.com Components in Electronics December/January 2022 51
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66
