Huawei invests in UK chip firm

UK startup and fabless semiconductor company XMOS this week announced $26.2m in Series D investment that will see Chinese vendor Huawei take its first equity stake in a British firm. The Chinese company joins Robert Bosch Venture Capital of Germany and Xilinx from the USA as strategic investors, alongside existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, DFJ Esprit, and Foundation Capital.

XMOS will be partnering with Huawei on a number of potential projects that will help to expand the company’s presence in multicore technology for embedded applications.

With Xilinx, the company will be working on All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, and 3D ICs.

XMOS, based in Bristol, develops a range of multicore microcontrollers with Hardware-Response providing a combination of parallel multitasking, deterministic performance, with support from a large library of software-defined peripherals targeted at demanding embedded applications in audio, automotive, consumer and industrial products.

The company recently embarked upon projects enabling current and near-future automotive functions such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.