36Kr Exclusive | High-end automotive-grade chip company "Chuangsheng" completes new financing worth nearly 100 million yuan.
36Kr learned that recently, Chuangsheng Semiconductor (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Chuangsheng Semiconductor"), a high - end automotive - grade communication chip enterprise, completed nearly 100 million yuan in angel and angel + round financing. The investors include Huaye Tiancheng, AAC Strategic Investment, iFlytek Venture Capital, Guoyuan Innovation Investment, etc.
Chuangsheng Semiconductor was founded in 2023 and is positioned in the mid - to high - end automotive - grade communication chips. The company's core team comes from international leading semiconductor companies such as TI and ADI. The R & D team all have over 20 years of chip R & D experience and are familiar with the design of high - speed interfaces, high - precision analog - digital hybrid, and digital signal processing chips related to vehicles. The marketing team has been deeply involved in the automotive field for 20 years and is familiar with the layout development and commercial implementation of various in - vehicle communication buses.
The company has been established for less than 2 years and has launched the MBUS1.0 series of in - vehicle audio communication chips with industry - leading performance, breaking the long - term foreign monopoly in this field. The products have advantages such as low latency, high bandwidth, cable power supply, easy vehicle wiring, and good EMC/EMI performance. Their performance indicators can be comparable to those of similar products from leading foreign companies in the industry and are expected to be officially mass - produced in July 2025.
The vehicle's E/E architecture is gradually evolving from a distributed to a centralized one. To adapt to the new E/E architecture, various new in - vehicle multimedia buses with high bandwidth, low wiring harness volume, and high bus access efficiency are emerging. Especially in the audio field, the demand for audio applications such as panoramic surround sound, zoned voice recognition, road noise reduction, and AVAS is becoming more and more common. The number of in - vehicle audio nodes has increased from 2 in 2014 to an average of more than 6 nodes. With the mass - production implementation of the RNC algorithm, vehicles may use more than 8 audio nodes.
As the demand for in - vehicle audio nodes increases, the design and layout of in - vehicle audio buses also face greater challenges: such as larger data transmission volume, higher data bandwidth requirements; higher requirements for latency in various audio algorithms; an increase in the number of vehicle wiring harnesses, making vehicle wiring more difficult; and EMC/EMI problems caused by complex long - distance wiring.
To address the above problems of multi - node audio transmission, an international company launched the first automotive audio bus (A2B) 2410 in 2014 and the enhanced 242x series in 2018, monopolizing the high - speed multimedia in - vehicle digital bus market for a long time.
When asked about the difficulties in the R & D and commercialization of high - speed multimedia in - vehicle buses and the reason why domestic semiconductor companies have not achieved substantial commercial breakthroughs in this field, Sophia, the chairman of Chuangsheng Semiconductor, said: "The in - vehicle audio bus uses UTP (unshielded twisted pair). UTP has the characteristics of easy bending, light weight, and easy installation, which is relatively friendly to the vehicle wiring harness design. However, since UTP has no shielding layer, it brings challenges to the vehicle's EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) design. This requires companies to have both rich experience in high - speed analog interface design and in - vehicle EMC system - level experience to handle; secondly, the design requirements for the reliability and consistency of automotive - grade products require companies to have more than ten years of mass - production experience in automotive - grade products.
At the same time, companies also need to adopt innovative analog - digital hybrid algorithms and designs to ensure signal integrity and system stability. The core team of Chuangsheng Semiconductor has been deeply involved in the industry for more than 20 years. After two years of efforts, the first batch of sampled products have been highly recognized by leading customers in the industry. At the same time, the MBUS1.0plus series under development by the company will be suitable for the next - generation E/E architecture, further breaking through the limitations of transmission speed and node capacity to meet more market demands."
Ma Yan, the person in charge of the strategic investment department of AAC Technologies, said: "How to efficiently achieve high - speed and accurate signal transmission between various nodes in the cockpit and how to use digital technology to assist in the development of the vehicle platform and reduce the complex underlying wiring harness are important basic conditions for the industry's development. The Chuangsheng team has rich design, product, and market experience in in - vehicle signal transmission and processing. We believe that Chuangsheng will contribute a series of excellent products to the industry's cockpit digitization. As a system - level acoustic solution provider in the automotive field, this strategic cooperation with Chuangsheng is conducive to improving the company's layout of key and underlying technologies from hardware, algorithms to chips. In the future, the two sides will deeply integrate their respective advantageous resources and continuously provide better and more diverse solutions for customers and the end - market."
Sun Xiaotian, a partner of iFlytek Venture Capital, said: "The market prospect of in - vehicle audio buses is clear, and there is no mature domestic solution yet. Chuangsheng's chip mass - production progress is leading, presenting an excellent market entry opportunity. The founding team has rich experience in high - speed interface chip design and has experience in both industrial - grade and automotive - grade products. The team is scarce and well - configured. iFlytek, as a technology leader in the in - vehicle acoustic field, is leading the AI - driven automotive sound revolution and has strong business synergy with Chuangsheng. The two are expected to jointly create an intelligent cockpit acoustic system with both acoustic quality, intelligent perception, and immersive experience."
He Renlong, the managing director of Huaye Tiancheng Capital, said: As the leading investor and incubator in the angel round of Chuangsheng Semiconductor, we discovered the founding team in Dallas, the United States in 2022 and have accompanied the company from scratch. We are very optimistic about the development opportunities in the in - vehicle audio track and congratulate the company on successfully completing the mass - production tape - out of the chips recently. We look forward to Chuangsheng contributing excellent in - vehicle audio industry solutions to the industry with the support of important customer partners.