GCT Semiconductor Raises $38 Million in Series C Financing
December 2, 2002 - San Jose, CA - GCT Semiconductor, Inc., a leading provider of radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits for wireless devices, announced today that it has successfully completed the closing of its $38 million Series C equity round. The Series C round was led by Pequot Ventures, and other participants included National Semiconductor Corporation, Pericom Semiconductor Corporation, UOB Venture Management, 3V SourceOne Ventures, Mizuho Capital, ITX International Equity. When added to the previous round of finacing led by the company's founding venture investor, Parakletos @ Ventures, this comes to a total of $54 million the company has raised since it's inception in 1998.
The company will utilize the new capital to transition its products from sampling into mass production, expand its geographical marketing presence and distribution channels, and continue developing innovative products based upon its patented direct conversion architecture. GCT currently has an international presence, consisting of its headquarters in San Jose, California, and offices in Seoul, Korea for Research & Development and Asia Pacific sales and marketing functions.
GCT's patented direct conversion architecture is the basis for all of its RF designs. This versatile RF architecture can support many of the wireless communication standards, including CDMA, GSM/GPRS, 802.11b/g, and Bluetooth. Further, all of GCT's devices are designed for fabrication on Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process technologies, which provides design integration possibilities, reliable manufacturing yields, and the proposition for a lower bill of materials than many competitive products currently on the market.
Initial products based on GCT's strong proprietary RF CMOS technology have been introduced to the CDMA, GSM, and 802.11b markets. Samples for these products have been distributed to a select group of customers that serve the wireless equipment industry. The company's future plans include introducing new radio designs that support additional standards, which will substantially increase the company's addressable market.
"The capital we have raised is a measure of the strong faith from our investors in our company's management and value proposition to the wireless device markets," commented Dr. Kyeongho Lee, President and CEO of GCT Semiconductor. "The positive feedback that we have already generated from our diverse customer base also indicates that our direct conversion architecture has excellent performance in their applications, and our future products will continue to save them development time and costs."
About GCT Semiconductor, Inc.
GCT Semiconductor is a leading fabless semiconductor company that produces innovative integrated circuit solutions for the wireless communications industry. With its proven radio frequency (RF) CMOS and system-on-a-chip (SOC) expertise, GCT provides state-of-the-art single-chip CMOS RF transceivers, mobile digital TV receivers and Mobile WiMAX solutions serving 3G and 4G mobile system manufacturers by reducing BOM cost, lowering power consumption and minimizing total solution size. For more information, please visit www.gctsemi.com.