Cosemi Technologies Inc., an Irvine-based maker of high-speed active optical cables, said it plans to accelerate growth and address market opportunities after obtaining $8 million in a financing round led by Nitto Denko Corp. of Japan.
The company said Dec. 15 it had closed the round headed by Nitto Denko, an Osaka-based diversified materials manufacturer and a Cosemi technology partner.
Cosemi designs and develops high-volume, high-performance, plug-and-play HDMI, DisplayPort and USB active optical cables that provide the performance and speed of fiber optics, along with the legacy support of control and power delivery over copper wire, in hybrid cable assemblies.
“We use a common term, which is cable but actually now it’s no longer a cable. Within the cable, it’s actually a sub-system,” Cosemi president and chief executive Nguyen Nguyen told the Business Journal on Dec. 23.
“You have the signal from your device that connects to copper but inside that little connector it’s actually converted from electrical to optical and then transmitted over fiber optics and then on the other side it’s converted back from optical to electrical and then connected to the device,” he said.
“We miniaturized the whole connection and then put it in the cable,” according to Nguyen.
The Nitto Denko funding will allow for new products and more production.
“In Nitto, we have found not only a strong financial partner but an equally strong technology partner,” Nguyen said. “We have also signed a joint development agreement for future generations of interconnect solutions that will feature technologies contributed by both Nitto and Cosemi. The first of these solutions will be available as early as the second half of 2021.”
Next Generation
Cosemi’s hybrid active cables are suited for many market segments, including 4K/8K displays, video collaboration platforms, machine vision, universal personal computing connectivity for enterprise and work-from-home applications, automotive, AR/VR, e-sport gaming and entertainment.
“Bandwidth-hungry multimedia and video, the Internet of Things, cloud services, big data—the list of things that gobble bandwidth at alarming rates is growing—as is the need for faster and faster ways to move all of this data over distances not achievable by copper-wired cabling,” Cosemi says on its website. “For demanding applications such as intra-data center interconnects, high-performance A/V interconnects and many more—fiber optics is the answer.”
Looking to the future, Nguyen said “the next-generation product we’re working on is 20 gigabits and then even further down the road is 40 gigabits.”
Cosemi says key customers include Logitech, Liberty AV, Poly and Molex.
Its contract manufacturing sites are in Vietnam, Taiwan and Thailand – all three of which avoid the U.S. tariffs on goods made in China.
‘Bigger Company’
Nguyen is Cosemi’s largest shareholder with Nitto Denko also an important stakeholder.
“We may be acquired by a bigger company,” the CEO told the Business Journal. The firm has experience in such sales; in February 2017, a unit of Broadcom acquired the photodetector business of Cosemi.
Cosemi said last month it had filed a patent infringement case against Chinese competitor Everpro and three other companies with the U.S. International Trade Commission. Cosemi says the ITC has opened a formal investigation into the complaint.
