| u-blox Holding AG | |
| Type: | Public company |
| Foundation: | 1997 |
| Location City: | Thalwil, canton of Zürich, Switzerland |
| Industry: | Semiconductors, Internet of Things (IoT) |
| Revenue: | [1] |
| Num Employees: | 1,300 (2023)[2] |
u-blox is a Swiss company that creates wireless semiconductors and modules for consumer, automotive and industrial markets. They operate as a fabless IC and design house. The company is listed at the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX:UBXN) and has offices in the US, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Greece.
u-blox is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH)[3] [4] and was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Thalwil, Switzerland. Thomas Seiler served as chief executive officer of u-blox AG from 2002 until his retirement on Dec 31, 2022. Stephan Zizala, who joined the company in 2022, succeeded Seiler.[5]
In 2016, u-blox opened a new office in Taipei, Taiwan.[6]
u-blox provides starter kits which allow quick prototyping of variety of applications for the Internet of Things.[7] It develops and sells chips and modules that support global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), including receivers for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS.[8] The wireless range consists of GSM-, UMTS- and CDMA2000 and LTE modules, as well as Bluetooth- and WiFi-modules. All these products enable the delivery of complete systems for location-based services and M2M applications (machine-to-machine communication) in the Internet of Things, that rely on the convergence of 2G/3G/4G, Bluetooth-, Wi-Fi technology and satellite navigation.[9] A collaboration to create GNSS receiver that work globally was started between u-blox, SoftBank and ALES in 2021.[10] One year later, in 2022, u-blox released the at the time smallest LTE Cat 4 Module LARA-L6.[11] The company launched a dual-band GNSS module in 2023 that uses the L1 as well as the L5 GPS frequency bands.[12] In 2024 u-blox released the LEXI-R10, which was, according to the company, the smallest LTE Cat 1bis module at time of launch.[13] [14]
They acquired a dozen companies after their IPO in 2007, after acquiring connectblue[15] in 2014 and Lesswire in 2015 [16] they acquired Rigado's module business in 2019.[17] In 2020, u-blox acquired Thingstream.[18] In 2021, u-blox AG acquired Sapcorda Services GmbH, a provider of high precision GNSS (global navigation satellite system) services.[19] and Naventik GmbH, a German company specializing in the development of safe positioning solutions for autonomous driving.[20]