Sydney based startup Morse Micro which is developing chipsets for the ‘low-power’ Wi-Fi standard IEEE 802.11ah (aka HaLow) has secured Series A funding of $23.8m from a range of investors.
HaLow has been designed for IoT applications. Access points consume much less power than other variants, can provide throughputs in multiple megabits per second and support up to 8000 devices over ranges up to 1km. It has sleep modes that will enable IP-addressable sensors and trackers to last up to five years on a coin cell battery. It operates in the 900MHz band.
The round was led by Ray Stata and Main Sequence Ventures, CSIRO Innovation Fund, with participation from Skip Capital, Blackbird Ventures, Right Click Capital, Uniseed, and the Clean Energy Innovation Fund.
Stata, founder and chairman of semiconductor manufacturer Analog Devices has been appointed to the board, joining co-founders Andrew Terry and Michael De Nil and Main Sequence Ventures partner Mike Nicholls.
Morse Micro said the funding would be used to take its HaLow chip to mass production, to double the size of its team across local and overseas markets, and to move its headquarters from Eveleigh to Sydney’s CBD.
It has sales offices in the US and China and will expand headcount in both of these to increase sales and customer support capabilities, but will keep R&D in Australia.
Stata said Sydney was an ideal location for the company’s headquarters: because of its links to the early days of Wi-Fi it has a large pool of engineers with Wi-Fi experience.
HaLow chip mass production in 2020
Terry told IoT Australia that the company had developed a prototype HaLow chip and was now putting in place the supply chain logistics and tooling for mass production in preparation for volume sales in 2020.
He said there had been interest from companies involved in a wide range of IoT applications.
“The ones where we see the strongest pull are those where security is very important, so they need reasonable data rates [to support the higher data volumes generated by encryption].
“So the applications that are best for us initially tend to be enterprise and industrial applications, as opposed to smart home and consumer applications. I think those come later.”
There are other companies planning HaLow chips but Terry said Morse Micro had the advantage of having a team with the skills to build a complete Wi-Fi system: the radios for the analogue and RF section, the digital baseband (sometimes known as physical layer) and the MAC layer.
He said most of the other companies working on HaLow chips started in only one of these three areas. “We are really the only company that’s got capabilities in all three areas and building a chip that includes all the three essential layers that you need.”
HaLow’s IoT role
Terry envisages HaLow dominating the medium range in-building communications for IoT with Bluetooth doing short range point to -point, current Wi-Fi technologies continuing to play an in-building short-range role and cellular technologies the wide area role.
“Bluetooth is basically personal area network. It is fundamentally point-to-point rather than native Internet,” he said.
“Wi-Fi dominates the whole of house or whole of office space because it works very well and it gives you a native IP connection. For wide area networks LTE-M and NB-IoT are very robust standards that will provide mobile solutions of low power IoT devices.”
Morse Micro’s impeccable Wi-Fi credentials
Morse Micro made it public debut just two months after its formation, at the Everything IoT event in Sydney in October 2016.
We reported it as comprising just three people Andy Terry – the RF & analogue expert; Dave Goodall – the media access controller and standards expert and Michael De Nil – the digital and software expert.
Terry told the EIoT audience: “The three of us have spent the last seven years designing Wi-Fi chips for Broadcom. We looked at the IoT space and the technologies available and felt there was nothing that really filled all the requirements.”
At that stage the company was in discussion with angel investors. Terry said it would need about $7.5m over the next three to four years.
Morse Micro was initially funded by Startmate and a group of angel investors in December 2016 and raised a $4.5m seed round in October 2017 from Main Sequence Ventures, PAN and Blackbird.
Its team now includes Wi-Fi co-inventor Dr John O’Sullivan, professor Neil Weste, co-founder of Sydney based Radiata, the first company to commercialise Wi-Fi chips – acquired by Cisco in 2000, and Goodall, one of the original authors of the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.
O’Sullivan’s work at CSIRO on the application of Fourier transforms to radio astronomy led to his invention with colleagues of the technology that became W-Fi.
Weste along with David Skellern, then professor of Electronics at Macquarie University’s Department of Electronics worked on developing WiFi chipsets with CSIRO before founding Radiata.
