U-blox

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.

History
u-blox is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) 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.

In 2016, u-blox opened a new office in Taipei, Taiwan.

Products and technology
u-blox provides starter kits which allow quick prototyping of variety of applications for the Internet of Things. It develops and sells chips and modules that support global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), including receivers for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS. 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. A collaboration to create GNSS receiver that work globally was started between u-blox, SoftBank and ALES in 2021. One year later, in 2022, u-blox released the at the time smallest LTE Cat 4 Module LARA-L6.

Acquisitions
They acquired a dozen companies after their IPO in 2007, after acquiring connectblue in 2014 and Lesswire in 2015 they acquired Rigado's module business in 2019. In 2020, u-blox acquired Thingstream. In 2021, u-blox AG acquired Sapcorda Services GmbH, a provider of high precision GNSS (global navigation satellite system) services. and Naventik GmbH, a German company specializing in the development of safe positioning solutions for autonomous driving.