Wireless communications spinout raises £2.5m to optimise 4G and 5G performance

University of Southampton spinout AccelerComm has completed a £2.5 million funding round to deliver faster speeds in a wireless connected world.

The investment will scale further development and commercialisation of IP solutions that improve the latency, throughput and error correction of next generation communications.

The semiconductor IP spinout, launched from expertise in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has closed its latest round led by Bloc Ventures and IP Group.

AccelerComm’s LDPC, polar and turbo FEC technologies deliver error correction decoding that is required to overcome the effects of noise, interference and poor signal strength. This enables optimum performance for everyday devices such as phones and tablets that rely on 4G LTE, 5G New Radio (NR) and MIMO cellular communications where low power, small footprint and ultra-low latency are all key requirements.

Professor Rob Maunder, AccelerComm founder and Chief Technology Officer, said: “Flexibility is key to success when developing advanced communications and these high performance standardised architectures in the wireless infrastructure market are enabling that flexibility while helping to reduce development time.”

Engineers from the spinout are demonstrating their latest software-only IP for 5G NR in support of virtualised networks on the Great Britain and Northern Ireland stand of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week.

AccelerComm’s optimised polar coding chain is already in commercial use today in 5G NR products, less than eight months after a release of 5G NR specification was concluded by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).

Through this latest investment Bloc Ventures - which was founded by industry veterans from Arm Holdings and Vodafone - will take a seat on the AccelerComm board.

Tom Cronk, AccelerComm’s newly appointed CEO and former Arm executive, said: “This investment supports and underwrites our strategy to meet the demand in a growing wireless connected world for products that can increase communications performance without compromising on size and power.”

To find out more about the spinout please visit: www.accelercomm.com.