For a long time, the news about domestic chips has received widespread attention from everyone. Recently, another domestic chip company announced the latest progress of its 5G chip products, which is worth mentioning.
The name of this company may not be well known to many people: Aojie Technology.
In an interview with the agency, Aojie Technology said that the company's 5G chip products have been successfully tape-out, and the company is continuing to actively promote the mass production of 5G chips.
Aojie Technology's 5G baseband chip supports NSA/SA, supports 4*4 MIMO carrier aggregation downstream, and supports 2*2 MIMO carrier aggregation upstream, with a maximum downlink rate of 4.6Gbps and a maximum uplink rate of 2.3Gbps. In terms of indicators, it is better than the Zhanrui V510, and is similar to the HiSilicon Baron 5000 and MediaTek T750.
Aojie Technology's 5G chip products are mainly cellular baseband chips. As we all know, the baseband chip is the communication module in the mobile phone, and the most important function is to communicate with the base station of the mobile communication network, and modulate, demodulate, encode and decode the wireless signals upstream and downstream. The chip that can demodulate, descramble, debork, debologue and decode the 5G baseband can support 5G networks, which is the key to a device being able to use 5G networks.
Cellular baseband chips have strong technical barriers and market barriers. Technical barriers are mainly reflected in the need to master the standard experience of 2G-4G technology, ensure the compatibility of massive code, overcome the design complexity brought about by multi-band full compatibility, and meet the extreme requirements of mobile terminals for power consumption, area and cost.
Market barriers are mainly reflected in: first of all, it is necessary to pass the compatibility certification test of hundreds of operators around the world. Secondly, the chip also needs to pass customer verification, the verification cycle is long, and the stickiness to the main chip manufacturer's solution is large.
Because the 5G baseband chip itself has the characteristics of high technical difficulty and high risk, domestic chips have been weak in this field before. Before Aojie Technology, only Huawei HiSilicon was Chinese mainland, and Tsinghua Unigroup Zhanrui had related mature products on the market. At present, the main baseband chips on the market belong to overseas chip giants such as Qualcomm, or enterprises with many years of accumulation such as MTK in Taiwan.
The 5G baseband chip products launched by Aojie Technology are currently more for the Internet of Things market. The Internet of Things market has a wide range of development potential in the future, and there are relatively suitable requirements for the cost and performance of baseband chips. More critically, Aojie Technology can also avoid direct competition with international giants such as Qualcomm as much as possible from the Internet of Things market, and there are relatively more opportunities.
It is worth mentioning that Aojie Technology also has some baseband chip products sold in the market. However, they are only deployed on functional machines, and their market competitiveness is relatively weak.
According to previous relevant information, Aojie Technology is a rare platform-based chip design company with full-scale cellular baseband communication technology in China, and has achieved a solid basic disk in the fields of Internet of Things cellular baseband chips and Internet of Things WiFi chips. The company's main business is divided into three categories: chip products, chip customization business, and IP licensing services.
According to the data disclosed in the prospectus, from January to June 2021, the sales revenue of chip products accounted for 88%, of which cellular baseband chips are the mainstay, which are currently mainly used in the cellular Internet of Things market. Chip customization business accounted for 11. 6％。 IP licensing services account for a relatively small proportion at this stage.
At this stage, the main application of the wifi chip of Aojie Technology is in the field of white goods, and the company's wifi chip has now passed the verification of the Midea Group and entered its supply chain, and will continue to implement a differentiated development route in the future. Aojie Technology also said that the company's products have strong product evolution and iteration capabilities, and have the ability to integrate cellular baseband chips with non-cellular chips, with richer product categories, higher cost performance, and stronger market competitiveness.
With the accumulation of Aojie Technology itself in the Internet of Things market, the company's chip products still have great potential for development. However, the current entire chip market is facing a shortage of wafers. Especially for a "small factory" such as Aojie Technology, whether the follow-up products can be successfully mass-produced and listed is related to the overall situation of the company's chip strategy development.
Aojie Technology also said that it will actively communicate with various fabs and strive to obtain better production capacity support.