Recently, the list of "Top 20 High-Tech and High-Growth Companies in Optics Valley" was released. Wuhan Juxin Microelectronics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Juxin Microelectronics"), which ranked first, not only achieved a compound revenue growth of more than 1,900% in the past three years, but its R&D expenses accounted for 180% of its revenue.

Juxin Microelectronics is a hard technology company located in Optics Valley.

Although Juxin Microelectronics has only been established for seven years, as "one of the highest-valued companies in Wuhan in the field of hard-core technology", its high-quality growth path is remarkable: it launched the first domestically developed back-illuminated, high-resolution ToF sensor chip; its self-developed intelligent audio chip has been shipped to a cumulative total of over 100 million units; and it has received nearly 1 billion yuan in cumulative investment from top domestic venture capital institutions and industrial funds.

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that "we should support the development of specialized, refined, and innovative enterprises." Manufacturing chips is no easy task. How has Juxin Microelectronics managed to survive and break through in this high-barrier industry? A reporter from the Yangtze River Daily's "On-Site Column" visited Wuhan Future Science City to explore the secrets to the growth of this national-level specialized, refined, and innovative "little giant" enterprise.

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Filling a domestic gap

Rapid growth across multiple product lines

In March 2020, Juxin Microelectronics released China's first independently developed back-illuminated, high-resolution ToF sensor chip.

"Returning to China to manufacture chips is an attempt to narrow the gap between China's semiconductor industry and the international market." In January 2016, Liu Deheng, a graduate of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and former Global Product Director at NXP's European headquarters, returned to his hometown of Wuhan to found Juxin Microelectronics. This innovative high-tech company focuses on the design of high-performance analog and mixed-signal chips. In addition to its Wuhan headquarters, it has subsidiaries in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Suzhou, and a European R&D center in the Netherlands.

In 2020, Juxin Microelectronics officially released China's first independently developed, back-illuminated, high-resolution Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor chip for 3D imaging. This chip utilizes globally leading back-illuminated technology, achieving a high degree of integration between the photosensitive device and processing circuitry on a single chip. This successfully filled a gap in the domestic field and made the company the third globally, after Sony and Samsung, to master this key core technology.

After multiple iterations and optimizations, Juxin Microelectronics launched its new generation of high-performance Time-of-Flight (ToF) 3D image sensor at the following year's Optoelectronics Expo. "The chip's area is only half that of the original, its performance is significantly improved, and it has a huge price advantage compared to foreign competitors," said Ke Yi, CTO of Juxin Microelectronics. He added that the chip has been widely used in smartphones, smart locks, machine vision, and other fields, "and can be compared with the best chips internationally, greatly promoting the accelerated development of machine vision in the robotics field."

From its early days as a single product line, Juxin Microelectronics now boasts multiple product lines, including intelligent audio, 3D vision, optical sensing, and tactile sensing. Among these, its intelligent audio amplifiers, with their differentiated product features and excellent cost-performance ratio, have gained recognition from mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, with nearly 300 million units produced in batches by leading companies such as Huawei, OPPO, Xiaomi, and Samsung. This product is also Juxin Microelectronics' primary source of revenue, accounting for over 95% of its revenue in 2022.

It is understood that the "Top 20 High-Tech and High-Growth Enterprises in Optics Valley" selection event in February this year selected relevant revenue data from 2019 to 2021. In 2019, the company's revenue was only over 4 million yuan, but in 2021 it surged to over 80 million yuan. In 2022, the global consumer electronics market was weak, but Juxin Microelectronics grew by more than 50%, with revenue reaching 130 million yuan.

Ke Yi stated that achieving a nearly 20-fold compound annual growth in revenue in just three years is merely a case of rapid growth within the integrated circuit industry. "As a technology industry, especially for consumer products, the initial revenue base is relatively small. Achieving a nearly 20-fold revenue growth in three years is both proof of the company's rapid growth and in line with objective laws, so it is not outrageous."

"In 2023, production lines for optical sensors, 3D intelligent image sensors, and linear motors will begin to occupy a more important position," Ke Yi said. He added that after the new products have been validated in the market, they will all be launched into mass production this year.

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Possess independent research and development capabilities

A down-to-earth engineering culture

Ke Yi, CTO of Juxin Microelectronics.

Following its selection as a Hubei Province Specialized, Refined, and Innovative "Little Giant" Enterprise in 2021, Juxin Microelectronics was once again selected as a national-level Specialized, Refined, and Innovative "Little Giant" Enterprise in August last year.

"Our core competitiveness lies in our independent R&D capabilities, market and industrialization capabilities, and our understanding of customers and products." According to Ke Yi, the core team of Juxin Microelectronics mostly comes from well-known chip design companies in Europe and the United States, possessing leading technological innovation capabilities and rich industrialization experience. Of the current more than 200 employees, R&D personnel account for more than 80%, of which more than 60% have postgraduate degrees or above, and nearly 30% are returnees from overseas.

According to the official WeChat account of Juxin Microelectronics, the company is recruiting recent graduates from universities at home and abroad, and has opened recruitment in multiple locations including Wuhan, the Netherlands, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. "The company will continue to recruit top talents and constantly prepare for entering new technology fields and launching new product lines."

Ke Yi graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He then pursued further studies at KU Leuven in Belgium and the European Microelectronics Centre. After working for many years at Broadcom, a leading global semiconductor company, he returned to his hometown of Wuhan at the end of 2018 with the goal of "making his own contribution to China's semiconductor industry" and joined Juxin Microelectronics.

According to Ke Yi, Juxin Microelectronics is a science and technology innovation company with engineers as its main workforce. The engineering culture of "being down-to-earth and looking up at the stars" has played a huge role in the growth of Juxin Microelectronics. "We conduct product research and development in a down-to-earth manner to ensure that every product can be finally launched. At the same time, we continue to explore the boundaries and open up new directions."

According to reports, since its establishment in 2016, Juxin Microelectronics has established a relatively complete engineer training system and has also joined hands with well-known domestic and foreign universities such as Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University Shenzhen Graduate School, and Hubei University to conduct joint training, learning by doing and learning by design, and continuously improving the quality of engineers.

"Technology companies must continuously invest and innovate in order to have good and innovative products," Ke Yi said. He added that Juxin Microelectronics will continue to invest in R&D. "In the future, as new product lines are mass-produced, we will continue to attract top talent teams in the industry. However, as revenue continues to grow, the proportion of R&D expenses to revenue will also decrease compared to the present."

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Achieve national first place in multiple fields

Nearly 1 billion yuan in total financing

Product showcase of Juxin Microelectronics.

At the beginning of last year, Juxin Microelectronics completed a Series D financing round of hundreds of millions of yuan, led by Five Sources Capital and followed by ByteDance and others. This round of financing was only half a year after its Series C strategic financing of hundreds of millions of yuan.

Since its inception, Juxin Microelectronics has received joint strategic investments from several leading mobile phone and automobile manufacturers and top-tier funds, with a total investment of nearly 1 billion yuan. It has received numerous accolades, including the 2019 China Chip Power Most Investable Award and being named one of the "Top Ten Venture Capital Favored Optics Valley Gazelle Companies."

“Juxin Microelectronics is one of the few teams in China that possesses both top-notch R&D capabilities and successful mass production experience in the fields of intelligent audio and advanced optical sensing, achieving the top position in the country in multiple fields,” said Liu Kai, partner of Five Sources Capital. He is optimistic about the development of the company’s next-generation 3D optical product line. “With the maturity of AR/VR and intelligent vehicle fields, a large number of optical application scenarios have emerged, and we believe that the company has the opportunity to become a leader in the next generation of optical sensing.”

It is understood that the mainstream CIS camera chips in mobile phones generally capture visible light information from the environment and form images through three channels. This can lead to some deviations when perceiving colors in nature. However, Juxin Microelectronics is about to launch a multispectral sensor that "can acquire information from the spectrum of infrared to visible light through more than a dozen channels, thereby helping the main camera of the mobile phone to better reproduce the optical information of the entire environment."

"The field of optical sensing has greater potential than smart audio, and we are in an absolute leading position in this field." Regarding the company's future R&D focus, Ke Yi explained, "Compared to other companies, all of our technologies are independently developed, and we have a deeper accumulation in the field of optical sensing. In the future, we will conduct more in-depth R&D and investment in optical technology, and shift our R&D direction from consumer electronics to automotive and industrial applications."

Ke Yi stated that Juxin Microelectronics will maintain its innovation, launching new product directions every two to three years, continuously introducing new product categories to the market, gradually building the company's technological and product moat, and plans to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board within three years.

(By Sun Ao, trainee reporter, and Li Qin, reporter, Changjiang Daily)

[Editor: Wang Rongfei]