INSIGHTS / News

Southampton SETsquared member, Cascoda, have successfully bid for €50k of funding under the SME instrument phase 1 EU Horizon 2020 funding programme.

Provided with about €3 billion in funding over the period 2014-2020, the SME Instrument helps high-potential SMEs to develop groundbreaking innovative ideas for products, services or processes that are ready to face global market competition.

Cascoda’s patented technology addresses the wireless home and building automation market.

There is a growing need for smart energy-efficient homes, offices and industrial plants, and this need is increasingly being supported by legislation.  Hence there is a growing market for technologies to enable this, through the deployment of smart metering as well as intelligent heating, ventilation, lighting, and monitoring control systems.  To address this market, a new class of low-power wireless protocols has been developed for the automation and control of the above systems.

To date, wireless home and building automation systems that employ such protocols have seen limited adoption, despite the technology being widely available, mainly because conventional semiconductor radio architectures are unable to fulfil the market need of whole-house coverage and ultra-low power consumption while using inexpensive semiconductor technology. 

Cascoda’s technology is unique because it delivers standards-based radio communication with whole-house coverage, high data-link reliability and ultra-low power consumption, while using inexpensive CMOS semiconductor technology.

They will use the funding to investigate the best fit for Cascoda’s technology and to find potential customers, partners and distributors.