The fabless Sydney chipmaker building Wi-Fi HaLow silicon - ten times the range of ordinary Wi-Fi, a fraction of the power, thousands of devices per access point.
In a warehouse-district office in Surry Hills, Sydney, a small team of chip designers spent the better part of a decade on a stubborn idea: that Wi-Fi should not stop at the front door. Morse Micro's answer is Wi-Fi HaLow - the sub-1 GHz flavour of Wi-Fi, formally IEEE 802.11ah - engineered for a world of sensors rather than laptops.
The tradeoff is deliberate. Where the Wi-Fi in a home router chases ever-higher peak speeds, Morse Micro's radios travel farther and sip power. Operating in license-exempt spectrum below one gigahertz, the technology reaches beyond a kilometre in open conditions, runs for years on a coin-cell battery, and lets a single access point talk to more than eight thousand devices. The company frames the whole package as roughly ten times the range, a hundred times the coverage area, and a thousand times the data volume of traditional Wi-Fi.
That is a niche with a large shadow. The Internet of Things has promised billions of connected devices for years, but stalled on an unglamorous problem: how to connect all of them cheaply, over distance, without draining batteries or paying cellular data fees. Morse Micro went straight at that problem - and built the silicon to solve it.
Morse Micro is a fabless semiconductor company. It designs Wi-Fi HaLow system-on-chips and reference modules, then hands manufacturing to foundries in Taiwan and mainland China, with assembly and warehousing routed through Singapore - a deliberately dual supply chain built to blunt geopolitical risk.
Its customers are the people who build things that need to talk. IoT device makers and OEMs designing security cameras, smart-home hardware, industrial and agricultural sensors, asset trackers and smart-city infrastructure buy Morse Micro's silicon, modules and evaluation kits - directly and through distributors such as Mouser. By late 2023 the company had shipped more than two million chips.
The problem it removes is the gap between two bad options. Cellular IoT reaches far but costs money per device and per byte. Conventional Wi-Fi is free to run but barely leaves the building. Short-range mesh options like Zigbee and Z-Wave sit inside closed ecosystems. Wi-Fi HaLow threads that needle: license-exempt spectrum, native IP support, the familiar Wi-Fi security stack, and range measured in kilometres.
Figures per Morse Micro and IEEE 802.11ah documentation. HaLow trades peak throughput for range, power and device density.
First-generation Wi-Fi HaLow system-on-chip delivering up to 43.3 Mbps in sub-1 GHz license-exempt spectrum, with the long range and low power IoT devices need.
Shipping since 2021Second-generation SoC with 256QAM modulation, up to 43 Mbps throughput and a 26 dBm internal power amplifier for extended range. Entered full mass production Sept 2025.
Mass production 2025Developer kits pairing Morse Micro modules with Raspberry Pi, STMicroelectronics STM32 boards and USB dongle/router platforms for fast prototyping.
Since 2023Next-generation evaluation and access-point platform built on the MM8108, rolling out across the US, EU, UK, Canada, Japan and Australia.
Launching Q1 2026Pre-certified HaLow modules from Morse Micro plus partners AzureWave, Vantron and Quectel, cutting integration time for volume customers.
2025Fabless: revenue from chip volume, modules and evaluation platforms sold to OEMs and module makers. Manufacturing outsourced; design kept in-house.
OngoingMorse Micro's advantage starts with pedigree. Co-founders Michael De Nil (CEO) and Andrew Terry (CTO) are Wi-Fi chip designers whose careers ran through the teams that put wireless radios into billions of phones. Around them sits a bench of veterans - including figures tied to the CSIRO work credited with inventing key Wi-Fi technology, and Analog Devices founder Ray Stata on the board.
That depth matters because HaLow is hard to do well. Squeezing a long-range, low-power radio into a chip a fifth the size of a conventional Wi-Fi processor is an analog-and-digital design problem, not a software one - the kind that takes years and patient capital to get right. Morse Micro's more than US$190M in funding bought the runway.
Against alternative IoT connectivity - LoRa and LoRaWAN, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, and cellular NB-IoT/LTE-M - the company's pitch is that HaLow keeps you inside the open Wi-Fi ecosystem while beating the short-range options on distance and the low-rate options on speed. Its most direct rivals are other HaLow and sub-1 GHz silicon vendors such as Newracom and Palma Ceia SemiDesign.
| Round | Amount | Date | Notable backers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Undisclosed | 2017 | Australian Government |
| Series A | A$42M (~US$30M) | May 2019 | Ray Stata, Scott Farquhar, Malcolm Turnbull, Blackbird, Main Sequence, CSIRO Innovation Fund |
| Series B | US$94M (A$140M+) | Sept 2022 | MegaChips (lead), Blackbird, Main Sequence |
| Series C | US$59M (A$88M) | Sept 2025 | MegaChips (lead), NRFC, Blackbird, Main Sequence, Uniseed, Ray Stata, the Turnbulls, Startmate |
Reported valuation ~US$700M (A$1B+) as of February 2023.
De Nil and Terry launch Morse Micro to build Wi-Fi HaLow chips for IoT.
Early backing stands up the fabless chip-design team.
Ray Stata, Scott Farquhar and Malcolm Turnbull among the backers.
Initial Wi-Fi HaLow silicon moves into production in Taiwan.
Japanese firm leads a large round; company wins IoT Product of the Year.
Singapore facility opens, 2M+ chips shipped, ~180 staff across seven countries.
Second-gen SoC ships in volume alongside a US$59M round led by MegaChips.
MM8108-based evaluation platform rolls out across major markets.
A single Morse Micro access point can connect up to 8,191 devices - a design built for a world of sensors, not screens.
The chips are roughly one-fifth the size of a traditional Wi-Fi processor.
HaLow devices can run for several years on a single coin-cell battery.
The team proved its range by beaming data across Sydney Harbour - bridge to Opera House.
Field trials at Joshua Tree National Park tested how far the signal really travels.
Morse Micro has been described as Australia's most prolific semiconductor producer.
Morse Micro publishes range demos, HaLow explainers and product walkthroughs on its channels.
It designs Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah) semiconductor chips - system-on-chips and modules - that provide long-range, low-power wireless connectivity for Internet of Things devices.
Wi-Fi HaLow is a sub-1 GHz version of Wi-Fi that trades peak speed for much longer range (over a kilometre), lower power use, and the ability to connect thousands of devices per access point - ideal for IoT.
It was founded in 2016 in Sydney, Australia, by Wi-Fi chip designers Michael De Nil (CEO) and Andrew Terry (CTO).
More than US$190 million across Seed to Series C, including a US$94M Series B (2022) and a US$59M Series C (2025), both led by Japan's MegaChips.
Unlike proprietary or licensed options, Wi-Fi HaLow uses license-exempt spectrum, native IP support and the familiar Wi-Fi ecosystem - offering higher data rates than LoRa/Zigbee while reaching far beyond conventional Wi-Fi and avoiding cellular data costs.