Focusing on reconfigurable digital power supply chips, "Shuixin Electronics" has completed a new round of tens of millions of equity financing. | 36Kr Exclusive

Author | Lin Qingqing

Editor | Yuan Silai

36Kr has learned that recently, the reconfigurable digital power management chip developer "Shuixin Electronics" has completed a new round of equity financing, amounting to several million yuan. The investors are Yuqiaohe Investment and Suzhou High-tech Innovation Angel Fund, and Mushi Capital serves as the exclusive financial advisor.

"Shuixin Electronics" was established in 2020 and is a company in China that focuses on reconfigurable digital power chips. The company put forward the concept of reconfigurable digital power chips and successfully achieved mass production. It is committed to solving digital power chip technology problems in several key fields, including communication, servers, industry, automobiles, new energy, power, Internet of Things, and high-end consumer electronics, etc.

In 2022, "Shuixin Electronics" completed a Pre-A round of financing of several million yuan, with participation from well-known investment institutions such as Shenzhen Baseus Technology Co., Ltd., Yuqiaohe Investment, and Suzhou Qianhui Capital.

Power chips are the "power managers" in electronic devices, responsible for ensuring that each component in the device receives the appropriate voltage and current. According to the statistics of the China Commerce Industry Research Institute, the scale of the Chinese analog chip market is expected to reach 317.58 billion yuan in 2024. However, despite the strong market demand, the domestic self-sufficiency rate is low, only 15% in 2023, and it is expected to increase to 16% in 2024.

Wu Yuchun, the founder of "Shuixin Electronics", pointed out that although the power chip market has reached the level of hundreds of billions, the market concentration is low, and high-end power chips, especially digital power chips, have not yet been localized. The localization rates of analog power chips and digital power chips are only 97% and 3%, respectively.

The introduction of reconfigurable digital power chips has brought a new breakthrough to the power management field. By introducing digital signal processing technology, the functions and performance parameters of the power chip can be adjusted and optimized through software. This design allows the power management needs to be adapted through programming without changing the hardware, improving the flexibility and efficiency of power management, while reducing the cost and complexity of the overall system. "Driven by 'Shuixin Electronics', reconfigurable digital power chips have become the best chip architecture for fast charging applications."

Wu Yuchun told 36Kr that the "reconfigurable digital power chip" of "Shuixin Electronics" has greatly improved the efficiency of chip application development compared to traditional analog power chip products. The company covers a vast market with a few product models, reduces the number of tape-outs and costs, shortens the market response time and product development cycle, significantly reduces the chip development cost, and improves the iteration speed of power technology.

Up to now, "Shuixin Electronics" has independently developed a series of products such as DSP high-power power/motor chips, VRM, fast charging chips, etc. Through the reconfigurable digital power chip technology, these products have realized the digitization of analog power chips, making the products have low power consumption, high cost performance, small size, and ease of use.

The product line of "Shuixin Electronics" covers fast charging protocol chips, fast charging multi-port charging SOC chips, fast charging power bank SOC chips, fast charging charging chips, high-end small household appliances/power tools/drones/portable energy storage chips, etc., serving the high-end consumer market. In the industrial automotive field, the company's products include automotive-grade buck-boost controller chips, high-voltage buck-boost controller chips, XPU multiphase power chips, DSP and high-end MCU chips, high-power digital power controller series chips, etc.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to independent product research and development, "Shuixin Electronics" opens its reconfigurable digital power chip platform to other enterprises for secondary development through technology licensing and cooperation. The core of this model is that "Shuixin Electronics" does not need to continuously conduct tape-out and manufacturing of physical chips, but can quickly respond to changes and demands in the market through software iterations, thereby reducing the R & D cost and time to a certain extent. This is similar to the business model of ARM, which provides basic processor architecture licensing, allowing partners to conduct customized development on this architecture to manufacture chips suitable for specific application fields.

In this model, "Shuixin Electronics" licenses the chip products and development platform to other chip companies and solution providers to realize the implementation of reconfigurable digital power chips in various subdivided fields. At the same time, it can also quickly iterate a variety of power chips with different functions, so that competitive products can be quickly launched without the need to repeatedly invest a huge amount of funds in basic research and development. Currently, many chip companies, even listed chip companies, have obtained the technology licensing of Shuixin, and the application fields cover multiple areas such as fast charging, power tools, drones, mobile phones, notebooks, PCs, automobiles, and industry.

Since its establishment, "Shuixin Electronics" has received angel round investment from Qianhui Capital, strategic investment from Baseus, and has established a strategic cooperative relationship with CATL. Last year, the company launched its first DSP chip.

Facing the increasingly competitive chip market, Wu Yuchun believes: " 'Shuixin Electronics' is more focused on solving the localization problem of high-end power chips, in an effort to get rid of the domestic dependence on imports in the high-end power chip field, especially in the multiphase power supply field of DSP and CPU/GPU, which are the key areas for national security and industrial development. The domestic market is highly competitive and there is serious homogeneity competition. However, the model of competing through plagiarism and low prices is short-sighted and unsustainable. Only continuous innovation can win the market. Recently, the United States has imposed an export embargo on 140 semiconductor companies in China, and various domestic departments have issued documents to support domestic chips, which is bound to set off another wave of chip localization."

"Shuixin Electronics" disclosed that the company will be the first to launch a full series of DSP chips with the highest computing power in China and software and hardware compatibility with TI c2000 in 2025, and enter the commercialization stage.

In terms of the team, Wu Yuchun, the founder of "Shuixin Electronics", graduated from Tsinghua University. He is the inventor of reconfigurable digital power chips and the pioneer of domestic power SOC. He used to be a digital power chip engineer at Analog Devices Inc. in the United States and the general manager of Enerchip Microelectronics. The core team of the company is composed of executives, technical backbones, and sales experts from international top chip companies, with more than 10 years of integrated circuit research and development and management experience. The company headquarters is located in Suzhou, and it has branches in Chengdu and Shenzhen.

Currently, "Shuixin Electronics" is conducting a new round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, and it is expected to complete the transaction before the Spring Festival in 2025.