Asking Price: Not DisclosedPatented Semiconductor IP for Item-Level RFID Tags
Salt Lake City, UT
Salt lake County
Our Client owns a granted United States patent, with a related international filing, on a new semiconductor timing circuit proven in fabricated silicon, and has designed on top of it a wireless architecture aimed at one of the largest unsolved problems in retail and logistics: true item-level tagging. A buyer acquires the patent and the filing, the unpublished know-how behind them, the fabricated silicon with its measurement data, the completed circuit designs, and a fully simulated wireless transceiver. The owners will consider a sale of the whole platform or of an individual field of use.The prize is item-level tagging: a tag small and cheap enough to go on every individual product and readable from across a room, so that a cart, a pallet or a whole warehouse inventories itself. A major retailer spent billions in the early 2000s pursuing exactly this and did not get there, because an antenna small enough to fit on an item forces a very short read range, while a useful range needs an antenna larger than the item. In this company's modeling its tag uses an antenna smaller than a printed barcode, reads at up to seven meters, and costs less per unit than scanning a barcode by hand. Global logistics and identification companies have spent a year or more in discussions with the founder, and every one asked to see working silicon first.The foundation is the timing circuit. Nearly every chip made contains a phase-locked loop, and for decades it has forced a compromise between locking on fast and locking on accurately. A widely cited academic paper concluded that instability cannot be eliminated in conventional loops, and the industry has spent twenty years on workarounds. Our Client removed the loop filter altogether. Its circuit, fabricated in a standard 180-nanometer process and measured on the bench, locks within a single reference cycle, reproduces the incoming timing at unity phase transfer, and shows none of that instability across a 250-to-1 frequency range. That is measured silicon, not simulation, and it has value today in clocking, frequency synthesis and high-speed interfaces.Because the timing is exact, our Client has designed a radio with no frequency-conversion stages and two signal states rather than the hundreds used by today's Wi-Fi and cellular links. Simulations show roughly eight times the data rate of a conventional high-speed link in a tenth of the spectrum, at range calculated several hundred times greater for the same transmit power. The same architecture addresses high-capacity Wi-Fi and fixed wireless, in-flight entertainment, and precise two-way ranging where satellite signals are weak. A working prototype is one fabrication run away. The company is pre-revenue and its value sits in what has been built: no sales team has ever existed and no marketing budget has been spent, so the commercial upside is open to an acquirer with established channels. The work has been covered in electronics design, identification and defense electronics trade press, and the founder will support a buyer through the transition.Our Client is selling because a larger company with the resources, manufacturing relationships and sales channels to enter these markets quickly can take this technology further and faster than a small founder-led company, and is seeking a strategic buyer in semiconductors, wireless, identification and logistics technology, aerospace or defense electronics who will carry it to market with the founder's support. Confidentiality is a concern for the seller while the right buyer is identified, so the specific city, exact ZIP and name of the business are shared only after a prospective buyer signs an NDA and is vetted, and the location and ZIP shown above reflect the broader market area rather than the operating location.NDA is required to secure a comprehensive Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM) crafted by ProNova Partners.
