Why Did UWB Technology Begin To Explode?
Who are the players?
In the past year, technology giants led by Apple and Samsung have begun frequent deployment of UWB technology.
In September 2019, Apple officially implanted a UWB chip called U1 in its iPhone11, which means that there are already tens of millions of supporting devices in the market; in September 2019, shortly after the Apple conference, NXP launched the UWB precision ranging chip SR100T; in February 2020, Qorvo acquired UWB positioning chip company Decawave for approximately US$400 million.
In August 2020, Samsung officially joined the UWB ultra-wideband technology in its Galaxy Note20 series of smartphones released; on October 11, 2020, Xiaomi officially released a finger connection solution based on UWB technology and demonstrated some applications Scenario: On October 14, 2020, at the Apple iPhone 12 series conference, it officially launched the HomePodmini equipped with UWB chips. Together with the previous Apple Watch Series 6, Apple began to promote UWB technology to other smart devices.
At present, the UWB consumer market mainly includes Apple, Samsung, NXP, and Xiaomi. As such giants successively add UWB chip modules to their new products, it indirectly promotes the accelerated popularization of this technology.
According to data from the Internet of Things Media, the market volume of UWB enterprise applications in my country will reach 12.15 billion yuan in 2022, far exceeding the 297 million yuan in 2016, achieving rapid growth. At present, Apple's UWB chip is self-developed, and Samsung and Xiaomi will adopt NXP chips according to predictions.
It is understood that the current major global UWB positioning technology industry giants include: Ireland DecaWave, UK Ubisense, US Time domain, Zebra, Netherlands NXP, etc. Dozens of domestic LR Electronics, HY Technology, JW Technology, and other dozens of companies have also begun to emerge. , To meet the market's dividend period. Judging from the current domestic market, there are not many manufacturers in this field, but under the huge market demand, UWB industry-related companies will continue to benefit.
UWB positioning chips supporting IEEE 802.15.4 have been widely used in government buildings, high-value warehouses, supermarkets, large manufacturing workshops, hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens, hotels, large restaurants, entertainment venues, prisons, residential communities, logistics companies, Position monitoring of museums, scientific research institutions, laboratories, and other personnel and important materials.
Around UWB technology, UWB mobile phones, smart bracelets, base stations, tags, and other products have been built. The core algorithms and other underlying technologies of the products are the results of the company’s self-research; and the company’s aforementioned products have been corrected in the community for mobile phones, nuclear power plants, medical care, elderly care, etc. There are mature cases in G-end and civilian scenarios such as parking and education.
In 2020, the UWB chip prototype development has been completed, breaking through a number of key technologies required by UWB chips such as low-power high-performance communication baseband IP, high-precision positioning IP, and analog radio frequency IP, and obtained related patented technologies.
On August 18, 2020, Chixin announced the completion of an angel round of financing of tens of millions of yuan for the research and development and commercialization of UWB chip products, and to expand the scale of the research and development team.
At this stage, although there are not many domestic giants entering the UWB field, there are a large number of small and medium-sized entrepreneurial teams in China engaged in the development of UWB solutions, mainly for indoor high-precision positioning and smart homes, smart parks, smart factories, and other scenarios. It is believed that as giants such as Apple drive the entire ecological industry chain, more and more companies will join the UWB market of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.
Why Did UWB Technology Begin To Explode?
Throughout the ages, for a technology to succeed, the most basic must rely on its technical foundation, it needs to have patents, the continuous improvement of standards, and it also needs time and location.
UWB has never been new technology. It has been widely used in all fields more than half a century ago, and it has entered the civilian field for more than 20 years. It has been used as a high-precision positioning technology for more than 10 years.
So why did technology giants such as Apple deploy it to their own products in the past two years?
The popularity of traditional communication technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi will be one of the reasons that hinder the advancement of UWB technology. In addition, the most fundamental thing is that UWB has no necessary application scenarios, that is, the ability to solve a single pain point.
The actual mobile Internet has developed for a long time, and the wireless connection between the device and the device can be realized by Bluetooth or WiFi, without the use of UWB. Secondly, even if you have peripheral accessories from different manufacturers, there are system and interface compatibility issues, these can be resolved through unified communication standards.
The maturity of Bluetooth and WiFi has reduced the overall chip and production costs. With the rich application scenarios brought about by long-distance transmission, UWB does not seem to have any cut-in opportunities.
Apple once promoted the automatic unlocking function by using Apple Watch close to the Mac computer. At that time, the two devices were connected by Bluetooth Low Energy, but in order to ensure safety, the Apple device also calculated the time difference between the round-trip time spent in signal transmission, and estimated the physical distance of the transmission, thereby avoiding relay attacks.
This application seems to be more suitable to be solved by UWB, due to its more accurate detection range and safety. Unfortunately, there are not many devices equipped with UWB chips, and the application scenarios are still relatively limited.
Obviously, Apple, which has a huge number of users, has begun to explore the application diversity of UWB technology. Since the iPhone 11 series was equipped with U1 chips for the first time last year, Apple has taken the lead in layout.
In fact, the public’s desire for new technology is not in the technology itself, but in whether it can really solve a potential application pain point.
Under the premise that there are more and more networked devices around, traditional wireless connection technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth cannot meet the requirements of users for transmission accuracy and speed between devices, which indicates that UWB technology has ushered in new development opportunities, and Apple's fancy is bound to be the era of the Internet of Everything.
There are actually several background factors why UWB broke out at this point in time.
On the one hand, with the advent of the era of the Internet of Everything, market studies have shown that more than half of the future IoT applications will require geographic location information. This is the basic logic of the explosion of positioning technology.
Although there are many positioning technologies on the market, such as Beidou, GPS, and base station positioning outdoors, and WIFI, Bluetooth, Zigbee, ultrasonic, inertial navigation, etc. indoors, their positioning accuracy is far from UWB.
Even if UWB is still not ideal in terms of power consumption and cost, the consumer market is constantly changing, and the improvement of user experience can make it more tolerant of a certain technological deficiency. This means that for UWB, the positioning accuracy is high enough, and its capabilities greatly surpass other competitors, and its power consumption and cost issues can be subsequently optimized.
On the other hand, the industrial chain has begun to mature gradually. After years of development of UWB positioning technology, it has enough technical foundation to enter the consumer market.
In recent years, the standard of UWB positioning technology has continued to improve and evolve, and related positioning algorithms have also been optimized. In the industry chain, you can see more and more companies entering, and chip players are starting to increase. These can enable companies to choose more topics on the standard version of the chip, reducing application difficulty and related costs.
UWB's technical and application advantages, whether a technology is truly successful, still need to fall into the real commercial ecological application for market verification.
Taking the smart home scene around us as an example, UWB technology can use mobile phones as the core to perform perceptual distance measurement, which minimizes the dependence on the node network mode in the traditional industry, and can realize functions such as remote control of the mobile phone IoT and smart unlocking. In this scenario, compared to frequently calling smart home control software, the application of UWB technology simplifies the interaction process between users and smart home devices.
If both the mobile phone and the door lock have a built-in UWB chip, when we hold the mobile phone close to the door, the door lock can be automatically opened, and the door will be automatically closed after entering the door. The same inductive design can also be applied to data transmission and intelligence.
Obviously, these can allow product managers to burst out more new innovative applications in home scenes such as finding objects and even audio-visual entertainment.
In addition, with the mobile phone as the hub, the functions that UWB can achieve are not only in the smart home scenario. For example, AirDrop can accurately locate the data transmission object, so that the iPhone can sort the surrounding people according to the distance, and the data transmission has priority.
In places where GPS signals cannot reach indoors, such as an airport or an underground parking lot in a shopping mall, UWB can help locate. Users can share their location with online ride-hailing drivers and inform their real-time location to help the driver find passengers. It is worth mentioning that Apple introduced the CarKey function in iOS14 to share car keys with relatives and friends through mobile phones. The original partner was BMW, which used ultra-wideband UWB technology.
It is reported that Apple plans to release a new small peripheral AirTags, with UWB wireless function, affixed to objects such as mobile phones, wallets, keys, and other objects, which can be easily found through the Find My application on the phone. The application scenarios of UWB technology have been unlocked from traditional industries to smart homes, smart offices, smart cities, smart transportation, consumer electronics, and other fields.
In the huge consumer market of smart homes, UWB technology will serve as the basis for future ecological disputes. Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi have announced their entry into the game. Major manufacturers such as OPPO, Vivo, and Huawei will obviously not fall behind. Will see them.
It is foreseeable that in the future, between different manufacturers, with mobile phones as the central control point, their peripheral smart ecological products will inevitably be equipped with UWB technology chips to further improve the interconnection experience of their own smart hardware devices.
The iPhone 12 series will promote the expansion of the UWB market
From the perspective of the large market structure, the explosive trend of UWB technology in the consumer electronics market has become more and more obvious. Judging from the sales of the iPhone 11 series in 2019, Apple alone has driven the market for more than 40 million UWB chips, and from the iPhone 12 this year, it will inevitably be tens of millions of sales, the UWB chip market The scale will gradually expand.
Driven by giants such as Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, UWB technology, markets, applications, and industrial ecology are all developing positively, and UWB's hundreds of billions of dollars of market has clearly moved towards us.