Lok Chi FungCaelus Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company specialized in offering low-power high-performance data converters and silicon-on-chip products (Analog-to-Digital converter or Digital-to-Analog converter). The name “Caelus” comes from an ancient Greek story where Caelus literally means “the god of the sky” who represents “Hope” and “Future”. Thus, the company hopes to bring enlightenment for the founding teams, colleagues, investors, partners, and customers.

Making a Breakthrough in the Global Chip Market

Lok Chi Fung, the Founder of Caelus. He reveals that the pre-inception of Caelus was originated from his observation towards the future development of power-efficient data converters over a wide bandwidth. When he was working in Huawei as a Senior Engineer in the Data Converter Group, Chi Fung found that the data converters offered by Analog Devices (ADI) and Texas Instruments (TI) were consuming a lot of power and this created an opportunity for the company to offer a product with similar performance at a much lower rate of power consumption to the customers.

Usually, the Chinese hardware companies purchase a huge amount of chips from western countries. However, the data converter technology in China lags over 10 years compared to that in the US. This situation gave a chance for Caelus to get into the market and lay its first step in China to cater to the semi-conductor market needs. These reasons led Chi Fung to quit his rewarding job and pushed him forward to work towards establishing Caelus in 2018.

A ‘Rising Star’ in the Technology Sphere

In Dec 2021, Caelus received the “Rising Star” award from Deloitte Hong Kong. The award was presented to companies that have high potential growth and might possibly become a technology giant within the next 5-10 years. Initially, the program was started in 1995 and most of the big tech companies have received this award before. The committee at Deloitte Hong Kong appreciates Caelus’s patent technologies and its market chance to develop the semi-conductor sphere in China.

An Expert Creating Patents  

As the Founder and CTO of the Caelus, Chi Fung is mainly responsible for creating 8-10 core patents in the company’s product chips. Those patent ideas differ from ADI and TI. Caelus can create precision and high-speed data converter products with lower power consumption at a lower cost. All these patents are registered in the US, China, perhaps, even at WTO. Chi Fung wholeheartedly hopes that his company’s product chip will be able to add a power-efficient feature to the customers when they use it.

Disruptive Technologies as a Tool to Tear Limitations

Chi Fung mentions that Caelus offers products using its own patent technologies that can break through a lot of fundamental performance limits. The products by Caelus leverage >10GSPS 12b ADC in 2022 while power consumption is about 35-40% from ADI and TI using a similar process technology. It can even make products at much lower power consumption by scaling into 7nm which is estimated to consume only 15-20% power from those in ADI and TI with a sampling rate of 16GSPS. Caelus is all set to offer products at a higher sampling rate and lower power consumption that helps communication hardware says Chi Fung.

He claims that Caelus always makes a point to use disruptive tech to the fullest. Disruptive tech at Caelus helps the team to innovate products with a higher sampling rate and lower power consumption compared to ADI and TI. Each company indeed uses different architectures and techniques to realize the similar performance of the data converters. Caelus also uses technology to leverage products in a low power consumption mode with a vision to stay environment friendly by not exhausting the resources on the planet.

Power-Efficient Data Converters at the Forefront of Innovation

 Chi Fung mentions that Caelus’s innovation is driven by its vision towards power-efficient data converters in the market. The company believes that the future data converter consumes a very low power to achieve precision or high speed. Chi Fung has been working in ADC/DAC for 14 years and is quite familiar with the bottleneck of data converter technologies with an ambition to achieve the goals.

Future: Enlighting the Goal with Better and Bigger Team 

 Chi Fung believes that the future of data converter offers a higher sampling rate with lower power consumption features. Caelus products provide a better performance, which in turn helps the industries to create more attractive products. Presently, hiring the right team is the most challenging part for Caelus. Most talented Engineers/Scientists prefer to work in large corporations instead of small companies. Chi Fung states that Caelus is continuing to search for good engineers to join them at Caelus. Currently, it only has less than 10 employees to work on several interesting projects. He hopes that the team can be one-fold in 2022.