CN — TechNode

Amicro Helped Robot Vacuums Find Their Way. Now It Wants to Go Further.

ChipsNovember 3, 20261 min read

Amicro, a Zhuhai chip company, is offering shares in Hong Kong. It makes chips and software that help robots find their way, and its parts sit inside many well-known cleaning robots.

A Hidden Supplier Goes Public

Amicro says eight of the world's ten leading smart cleaning robot companies have used its technology. Its customers include Xiaomi, iRobot, Ecovacs, Philips, SEB and Anker. Amicro is offering shares in Hong Kong, with trading expected to begin on November 12. The company wants a bigger role in robotics, not only in home floor cleaners.

Key Facts

Amicro says 8 of the world's top 10 smart cleaning robot companies have used its solutions.
The company was founded in 2014 in Hengqin, Zhuhai, under the name Amicro Semiconductor.
Its AM380S chip reached tape-out in December 2016. Mass production in cleaning robots began in June 2017.
Its AM680 chip followed in 2018 and extended the product line into visual navigation.
Trading in Hong Kong is expected to begin on November 12.

Why Robot Vacuums Need Good Navigation

A home is hard for a robot to move through. Furniture blocks paths, and rooms connect through narrow gaps. Amicro started by helping robot vacuums map rooms and find their way back to a charger. Its work then grew to include cameras, laser sensors and the software that combines them.

Why It Matters

Amicro shows how a small specialist company can grow by supplying the parts inside other brands' products. If its know-how from household floors works in harder settings, it could help a wider range of robots. The IPO also gives investors a way to see how these hidden suppliers earn money.

What to Watch

Whether trading starts on November 12 as expected.
Whether Amicro wins work outside home cleaning robots.
How its chips and software perform in more varied environments.
How well it keeps its large customers such as Xiaomi and iRobot.

Glossary

Amicro: A Zhuhai company that makes chips, algorithms and parts that help robots find their position and move around.
IPO: Initial public offering: the first time a company sells shares to the public on a stock market.
Hengqin: A district in Zhuhai, China, where Amicro was established in 2014.

28 nm Security Chip Developed by Vietnamese Engineers

Viettel engineers and the Government Cipher Committee developed the VGC v1.0 security chip, built on a 28 nm CMOS process with 300 million transistors, which Viettel says performs encryption and decryption about 15 times faster than software-only solutions. The chip integrates the national MKV block cipher and is first being used in secure USB drives for Party, state and defense agencies, with plans for digital signature tokens. The chip was unveiled on November 3, and the first batch passed technical testing and received certification in Q1 2026.

ChipsVnExpressNov 3

FPT Begins Trial Operations of Chip Plant in Bac Ninh

FPT has started trial operations at its chip testing and packaging plant in Bac Ninh, which has six production lines and a maximum design capacity of 300 million chips per year. The 1,600-square-meter facility is located in Yen Phong II-C industrial park, and the company plans to fulfill its first chip testing order for a South Korean partner. Initial work focuses on functional testing and reliability checks, and the plant will also serve as a training site for students from FPT Polytechnic starting in December.

Chips전자신문Nov 3

Rep. Im Moon-young urges AMD to set up AI research center in Gwangju, citing five location strengths

Democratic Party lawmaker Im Moon-young met AMD Senior Vice President Keith Strier in Seoul to again propose a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Gwangju, leveraging the city's AI and semiconductor infrastructure. He cited five strengths: a planned domestic NPU-based AI data center, R&D special zone investment support, a planned semiconductor production facility, next-generation optical semiconductor research capability, and proximity to the Seoul metropolitan area. The meeting follows Im's earlier proposal to AMD CEO Lisa Su, and he pledged National Assembly support if the center is established.

ChipsThe RegisterNov 3

Toyota shows off SoC that stores model weights and its OS on integrated memory

Toyota major shareholder AISIN has developed a system-on-chip built on a 16nm FinFET process with an Arm Cortex-A53 dual-core CPU and Arm Mali-G31 GPU, using built-in STT-MRAM to store AI model weights and an operating system. AISIN and Tohoku University say the chip reaches kernel startup in 65.7 milliseconds, 38 times faster than using external memory, and can run the Tiny YOLOv3 object detection algorithm. AISIN has not said if or when the chip will enter production.