“Sibaichuang” received more than 100 million yuan in Pre-A round of financing, aiming at the 5G future market to provide differentiated products and solutions for RF filtering

Author｜Wei Shiwei

36 Krypton learned that the domestic RF front-end acoustic filter company “Sibaichuang” recently announced the completion of the Pre-A round of financing of over 100 million yuan, led by SDIC Venture Capital, followed by Qingsong Fund, and Xinyi Capital as the exclusive financial advisor. This round of financing will be mainly used for product research and development, expanding market coverage, and at the same time investing in product development and technical reserves for potential application scenarios in the future 5G market, and improving the differentiation of high-end filter products.

Cebaichuang was established in March 2020. By building an international team, it focuses on technology research and development, product design and device manufacturing in a strongly coupled supply chain, providing the industry with 5G RF front-end filters and cost-effective RF one-stop solutions , with comprehensive advanced packaging technologies, including Baredie, CSP, TCSP, WLP, etc., as well as acoustic filter device technologies that completely cover SAW, TC-SAW, LAW and single-core multi-frequency Multiplexer. At present, the company is headquartered in Shenzhen, has set up sales and technical support centers in South China and East China, and has a wholly-owned subsidiary in Europe as a product design center.

For the Cebaichuang team, research and development accounted for about 70%, and doctors accounted for about 25%. The founder and CEO of the company, Dr. Gong Songbin, has 18 years of design experience in the fields of RF and millimeter wave mechanical filter design, RF analog circuit design, etc., and has published 220 high-level peer-reviewed journals and conference articles, covering micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), Semiconductor and integrated optical chips realize radio frequency and millimeter wave communication terminals and computing and sensing platforms. Cebaichuang’s technology R&D and manufacturing department is led and managed by well-known experts with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Team members have been responsible for the development and manufacturing of many well-known RF chips in the industry.

According to Yole data, the global filter market will reach US$6.625 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach US$9.546 billion in 2025, with a five-year compound growth rate of 7.6%. At the same time, the global filter market is mainly monopolized by Japanese and American players, and the market share is highly concentrated. In 2020, the top three SAW filter manufacturers accounted for a total of 87%, namely Murata (50%), TDK (22%), Taiyoyu Electricity (15%), BAW filter Broadcom accounted for 87%, and Qorvo accounted for 8%.

From another perspective, “The era of 5G can be divided into three stages of development: pre-5G, middle, and post-development. Among them, 2023 may be the last year of the pre-5G era.” Gong Songbin told 36 Krypton that in the pre-5G era, the filter market The more popular product method is to provide customers with highly integrated solutions and one-stop services, which can not only reduce the difficulty of design, shorten the product verification cycle, but also help customers launch 5G products faster.

“But in the mid-to-mid 5G era, customers may propose a more balanced product approach on the demand side.” He explained, especially customers with strict cost-effective requirements, may do their own research and development on the mid-to-low-end track, To reduce costs through the solution of discrete devices, there will be more suppliers to choose from. In the post-5G era, players will be under more pressure to reduce costs, and to popularize 5G technology to more developing countries, even non-developed markets.

In summary, Gong Songbin believes that the development of 5G will bring three major trends to the filter market. First, the innovation of chip companies should focus on reducing costs, making 5G products more accessible to the people and better achieving scale; second, There will be more and more frequency bands that mobile phones can support at the same time, and there will be more parallel links, which will lead to more complex front-end links in chip design, and more urgent requirements for reducing chip size and improving high integration; With the maturity of 5G infrastructure and the diversification of application scenarios, operators will deploy and cover more emerging 5G frequency bands, the mutual interference between frequency bands will increase, and the requirements for filter performance corresponding to the coexistence of applications in adjacent frequency bands will be further improved. Including the need for higher Q value, larger bandwidth range, steeper roll-off and better out-of-band rejection. These three major technological trends are also the direction of the technological path of IDEAS Innovation.

In terms of products, Cebaichuang currently focuses on duplex filter products, which can cover both transmitting and receiving filtering applications. In 2022, the company has completed the development of some products, and many products have successively completed tape-out, mass production, customer certification and put into the market. At present, nearly 25 product packages have entered the market, mainly for consumer electronics, Internet of Things and gateways market.

Among them, Cebaichuang launched a receiver module chip in 2022, which has the characteristics of multi-chip integration, including a large switch chip and five filter chips, covering a total of 12 filter frequency bands. Through the layout of the receiver and transmitter modules, the company can provide customers with one-stop product package services.

Talking about the technical moat of Cebaichuang, Gong Songbin believes that the first is patents and intellectual property rights. As of July 2021, the company has reserved dozens of patents in the fields of wafer materials, preparation methods, and packaging technologies; the second is the company’s independent The developed Spectron design and R&D platform consists of physical models, filter topology selection, high-speed full-wave simulation and algorithm-driven iterative optimization core modules. It has the characteristics of high design throughput, high precision and high scalability, and can Further shorten the R&D cycle, reduce design costs, and accelerate product commercialization; third, the company has obvious differentiation in products with unique technologies, which respond to customers’ pain points, and can be promoted quickly in customers, so that it can realize scale effect as soon as possible and bring costs and supply chain advantages.

“So far, Cebaichuang is still a company with technological innovation and product design as its core competitiveness.” Gong Songbin said that at this stage, the company is focusing on products with high design thresholds and rich accumulation of technical knowhow. For example, the duplex filter track that the company is targeting has high technical and design difficulties. It not only requires the transmitter to reach a certain power threshold, but also needs to control the accuracy and isolation of the frequency setting between the two filters. It is also necessary to realize a low-cost solution for monocrystalline integration. “There are a series of complexities and difficulties in the combination of design and process, which has caused most domestic manufacturers to get involved in comprehensive duplex products. This will give us a lot of competition. Bring great differentiation, we can also have more commercial value.” He said.

In terms of landing, Cebaichuang’s duplex filter products have now covered the domestic, North American, and European markets. Among them, discrete devices have achieved 60%-70% coverage of overseas friends. It will reach 100% coverage within two years to better compete with foreign first-line manufacturers. At the same time, in the future growth, it will also develop into a business model that can guarantee production capacity, customize the process, and highly compress and innovate the production cycle.

Specifically, by 2023, Gong Songbin mentioned that this year’s product packages and differentiated products will achieve mass production and shipment, which can increase the company’s economies of scale and provide more help for the company’s development of next-generation 5G products. Drive product definition.

Investor says:

Wang Leijian, executive general manager of SDIC Entrepreneurship, said: “The market for RF filters for terminals is huge, but the market has been monopolized by American and Japanese companies for a long time. In recent years, many Chinese companies have entered this industry, and the localization rate has been improved to a certain extent, but At present, there are still only a handful of domestic companies that can supply in batches, and there is a huge gap between market demand and local production. Especially in the direction of high-end filters such as TC-SAW, IHP-SAW and BAW, it is difficult to completely bypass the competition of American and Japanese manufacturers. Due to patent constraints, many companies have fallen into technical disputes with foreign manufacturers. SDIC Entrepreneurship has always maintained a high degree of attention to the direction of RF filters. The core team of Cebaichuang belongs to the top team in the world. A large number of original technological breakthroughs have been achieved in module design and packaging technology, and we expect Cebaichuang to become a heavyweight player in the future to face the competition of international leading companies.”

Dr. Hu Youzhou, a partner of Qingsong Fund, said: “We have investigated many technologies and companies at home and abroad. Cebaichuang is one of the very few companies in China that can fully break through the patent monopoly of foreign filter giants. The company has mastered unique materials, processes and designs. Existing and controllable core technology, while the product performance is equal to or better than international giants, and has obvious advantages in the current environment of domestic substitution. The company’s core team complements each other’s strengths, and the current business is progressing smoothly. I believe that product development in 2023 and sales will enter the fast lane, and quickly become a well-known enterprise in the domestic RF industry!”

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