The Slkor editorial team met Li Gang at Room 501, West Tower, Tian’an Innovation and Technology Plaza, Chegongmiao, Futian District, Shenzhen. As co-founder of Chengdu Songyuan Technology Co., Ltd. and general manager of Yunfan Ruida Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., he chatted with the Slkor team for over an hour, with topics ranging from millimeter-wave radar technology to the silver economy served by their products.

Li Gang, General Manager of Yunfan Ruida and Co-founder of Songyuan Technology

“Before starting my business, I spent seven or eight years in product R&D and even served as head of the development department, working with microcontrollers every day,” said Li Gang. In 2011, at the age of 35, he moved south to Shenzhen to start his entrepreneurial journey. He began by providing solutions for domestic MCU manufacturer GigaDevice (GD), and later rode the wave of explosive growth in the IoT industry. In 2018, through an opportunity with his college classmate, he ventured into the field of millimeter-wave radar. The two integrated radar technology into IoT products and discovered that the smart home market had far greater potential than the automotive market. They decided to focus on millimeter-wave radar and expand into the smart home sector, founding Songyuan Technology (2018) and Yunfan Ruida (2019) – with Yunfan Ruida being a subsidiary of Chengdu Songyuan Technology.

Yunfan Ruida Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. – Front Office

Currently, Li Gang is based in Shenzhen, focusing on marketing and product application development, while his two other co-founders delve into basic technologies in Chengdu. “You at Slkor make MOSFETs and power devices; we do millimeter-wave radar – essentially, we are both B2B technology service enterprises,” Li Gang explained. Songyuan Technology does not make chips nor consumer-facing end products; the company positions itself as a solution service provider. In his view, that is precisely its core competitiveness: “Chip products are highly standardized and cannot offer much customization, whereas our technical support and product customization capabilities are our strengths.”

Songyuan Technology and Yunfan Ruida focus on three major functions: smart home sensing, smart appliance empowerment, and smart health & elderly care, helping clients achieve innovative applications in scenarios such as smart homes, smart sleep, smart health care, smart hotels, and smart offices. The core team has a solid background – CTO Dr. Du has over 20 years of experience in radar systems and signal processing, having led radar customization projects for major manufacturers like Midea, Gree, Hisense, and TCL. PhDs and master’s degree holders account for 30% of the team, with most core members graduating from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

“We focus on the home appliance market,” Li Gang said. “Home appliances have large production volumes and high quality requirements, making them a major profit source for us.” Songyuan Technology is a top-tier partner of Infineon and has developed multiple millimeter-wave radar modules based on Infineon’s radar chips. In the air-conditioning sector, Songyuan’s sleep analysis technology has achieved industry-leading performance, with an error rate within 5 minutes and an accuracy rate exceeding 90%. The radar can detect when a user gets into bed, turns over, or makes slight movements, and then automatically adjust the temperature and humidity via the air conditioner. This solution has already been deployed in mass production for high-end models for clients in China, Japan, and South Korea. Radar modules are also widely used in televisions, toilets, bath heaters, fans, central control panels, projectors, washing machines, and more.

Application scenarios for Songyuan Technology’s radar modules

Lighting is another major advantage area for Songyuan Technology. Li Gang mentioned, “The lighting industry is a much broader market.” Through precise human presence detection, radar modules enable energy-saving management in commercial lighting, residential lighting, and smart streetlights – “light on when people come, light off when they leave.” As a director of the Shanghai Pudong Smart Lighting Union, he has his own insights into lighting scenarios: “The customer base in the lighting industry is very wide, covering homes, hotels, shopping malls, and various other settings. Currently, we are promoting smart home applications such as fall-detection lights in bathrooms and sleep-analysis-linked lights – this is one of Songyuan’s future directions.”

In Li Gang’s product definition, “silver guardian” is a market direction that holds great promise, yet he clearly recognizes its uniqueness. “Compared with home appliances, the health industry is too fragmented,” he admitted. “For example, in Shenzhen, Longhua District has its own elderly-care system, and Futian District has its own – each with different channels.” Nevertheless, he has invested significant effort in this area.

Yunfan Ruida’s recently launched “Silver Guardian 2027 New Trends” solution revolves around bedroom care, bathroom fall detection, sleep monitoring, and other scenarios. Its core advantage is “unobtrusiveness” – no wearable devices required, no privacy invasion, yet it can accurately sense human presence, breathing micro-movements, and posture changes. “The most important thing in home-based health care is to make the elderly feel comfortable and safe, without causing any inconvenience. For example, when they get up to the bathroom at night, the light turns on automatically; when they fall asleep, the light turns off automatically.” In bathroom scenarios, the fall-alert radar can cover an area of 5–7 square meters. “For bedridden elderly, the fall reporting rate must be 100% – no misses. But for more active seniors, a low false-alarm rate is more important. Different scenarios call for different settings – that’s our product logic.”

Li Gang during the interview

From R&D engineer to product manager to business leader, Li Gang has always maintained a strong dedication to products. “I am essentially the group’s product manager – what the company sells is ultimately decided by me.” This “deep involvement” means he knows every product detail inside out – from the automatic temperature adjustment logic of the air-conditioning sleep radar, to the sensitivity settings of fall detection, to the threshold definitions for abnormal respiration detection – all of which he repeatedly discusses with the R&D team. “Running a business is like driving a car – you can only see 50 meters ahead. No one knows where the cliff or the pothole is. So our most critical ability is our strong adaptability.”

Li Gang sharing the company’s millimeter-wave radar solutions

As the interview drew to a close, Li Gang was asked about his expectations ten years from now. After a moment’s thought, he said: “When you start a business, at first you might just master a technology, then you become a businessman. As you go on, it turns into an ideal, or a responsibility. Now, my confidence in making great products is greater than my desire for an IPO or acquisition. I hope my product definitions will influence the industry in the future – what they will bring to the elderly – and lead the industry forward.”

“Is that the sentiment of a technologist?” asked the Slkor reporter.

“I guess so,” Li Gang said with a smile. “Actually, running a business is like gambling – there’s a thrill. But as you keep going, it becomes about simply wanting to do things well.”