Hubei Daily News (Reporter Li Mo, Correspondent Yan Wei) On June 1st, Wuhan Optics Valley ToF chip design company Juxin Microelectronics announced the completion of a RMB 180 million Series B financing round. RMB 120 million was led by Heli Capital, with Source Code Capital participating, and RMB 60 million was jointly invested by Hushan Capital, Jiangmen Venture Capital, and a well-known mobile phone industry chain fund. This is the largest financing round completed by a Hubei chip company since the outbreak of the epidemic, demonstrating the continued enthusiasm of out-of-province capital for investing in Wuhan's "chip power."

Juxin Microelectronics is a company specializing in the design and application systems of high-performance analog and mixed-signal chips. Headquartered in Wuhan Future Science City, it has R&D centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Europe, and the Americas. Currently, the company has two main product lines: 3D vision and intelligent audio, and has acquired dozens of independent intellectual property rights.

Time-of-Flight (ToF) 3D vision technology primarily calculates the distance between an object and a light source by measuring the time difference of near-infrared light reflection, thus creating stereoscopic vision. Compared to structured light and binocular technology, ToF technology offers advantages such as lower system cost, simpler and more stable structure, longer measurement distance, and greater suitability for outdoor scenarios, making it widely used in industries such as mobile phones and automobiles.

In March of this year, Juxin Microelectronics launched a back-illuminated, high-resolution ToF sensor chip with completely independent intellectual property rights, suitable for high-precision applications such as facial recognition and 3D modeling. Another intelligent audio amplifier product and solution has already been applied to tens of millions of leading brand smartphones.

In April, Apple released a new iPad Pro equipped with ToF LiDAR technology, outlining a world that blends reality and virtuality, evolving human-machine interaction into human-world interaction. Liu Deheng, founder and CEO of Juxin Microelectronics, said that this revolutionary product symbolizes the arrival of the AR (Augmented Reality) era, and the AR world begins with the 3D reconstruction of the real environment. Juxin is deeply investing in core technologies in the field of 3D perception, leveraging its accumulated expertise in 3D vision, 3D audio, and tactile perception to promote the development and application of multi-sensory fusion technology, better serving the 3D restoration and reconstruction of the real world.

Currently, Optics Valley is building a trillion-yuan industrial cluster encompassing chips, displays, terminals, and networks, with the integrated circuit industry being of paramount importance. It is understood that Juxin Microelectronics' latest round of financing will be used not only to expand the mass production of back-illuminated high-resolution iToF and smart audio products, but also to invest in the research and development of LiDAR, optical sensing, and multi-sensor fusion technologies.

Tang Zhihua, partner of Heli Capital, the lead investor in this round of financing, stated that 3D vision and perception is a highly promising and explosive growth sector, with technological innovation and market structure evolving rapidly, and there is still huge room for future growth. Heli Capital possesses extensive experience in semiconductor industrialization and industry resources, which will empower Juxin in multiple key links of the industry chain, such as wafer foundry, packaging, and testing.

"The epidemic will not affect capital's confidence in Hubei's high-tech industries. Talent and innovation are Hubei's hope," said Tang Zhihua.

Editor: Chen Xi