Core stuff (public number: aichip001)
Author | Cheng Qian
Edit | Panken
The UWB chip caught fire suddenly, and it didn't burn strong enough.
On March 28, the world's first UWB digital key was officially delivered in NIO's flagship sedan ET7, with the blessing of this technology, the owner does not need to pull out the key, can unlock the door. This wireless communication technology, which was taken by Apple, is spreading the terminal application boom to the car circle.
▲NIO ET7 supports UWB smart key, mobile phone UWB/BLE key, NFC card/mobile phone NFC unlock door (Source: NIO)
Until September 2019, Apple first introduced the UWB chip into its flagship mobile phone, which is good at short-distance accurate positioning of "black technology", which has been unlocked by device connections, wireless payment, finding lost items, live detection, replacing physical keys without sense of driving doors and other functions. UWB technology, which has long been dormant in industrial-grade applications, is beginning to gain prominence in the consumer market.
Under the support of technology giants, the UWB industry has received unprecedented attention, and a large amount of capital has begun to pour into this track, which is a sudden "surprise" for domestic companies that have been cultivating UWB chips for a long time. However, whether it can catch these surging opportunities will test the strength of UWB chip companies.
In the increasingly fierce war, advanced technology is a chip that Chen Zhenqi, a veteran of communication chips, is proud of. In February this year, a UWB ultra-broadband positioning communication transceiver chip paper was published at ISSCC 2022, the international summit known as the "Chip Olympics", becoming the only industrial paper selected in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macao this year, and its source is the NewRexus company founded by Chen Zhenqi.
▲Nureken's paper on the design of UWB ultra-wideband positioning communication chip was included in ISSCC 2022
At the beginning of this year, Nurexin has added to the results. Before becoming the first Chinese mainland enterprise to publish the results of wireless communication whole system-on-chip at ISSCC, it just announced the completion of a 200 million yuan A round of financing, including domestic MEMS leader Goertek. Up to now, Nureatic has completed three rounds of financing, and a number of UWB chips developed for different applications will be put on the market this year.
When the UWB chip industry is still in the smallest, how does Chen Zhenqi lead the NWS team to accumulate technical strength and engineering experience, and establish its own barriers in the competition with domestic and foreign enterprises? How does he see the future trend of the UWB chip industry? Recently, Core Things had an in-depth exchange with Dr. Chen Zhenqi, founder and CEO of Nurixin.
Through the dialogue with Chen Zhenqi, we not only reviewed several key advanced processes of the "past and present life" of UWB chips, but also interpreted the technical ideas and business strategies of NewRichip to deal with UWB chips.
▲Chen Zhenqi, founder and CEO of Nurixin
1. Graduated from Tsinghua University, Qualcomm trained, and started a business before the dawn of UWB
Before founding Nurixin, Chen Zhenqi worked in the core R&D team of Qualcomm mobile phone RF chips for 10 years.
Chen Zhenqi's bachelor's and master's degrees were both studied in communications at Tsinghua University, and then went to Auburn University in the United States to study for a doctorate in microelectronics, and after graduation, he joined Qualcomm as a chief engineer and participated in the core research and development of mobile phone RF chips. These experiences have enabled him to continue to precipitate in the fields of communication protocols, communication systems, and communication algorithms.
In 2014, the strategic position of chips has become increasingly prominent, many Chinese consumer electronic products have come to the forefront of the world, but the core chip technology is still very scarce, domestic integrated circuits have become the largest imported commodities in China, and the import volume far exceeds that of oil. After paying attention to these phenomena, the idea of starting a business began to take shape in Chen Zhenqi's mind.
Chen Zhenqi and several classmates and friends hit it off at once, and gathered talents from system, digital, analog, RF to market sales to form a full-chain team with first-line industry experience. Its core team is mainly based on Tsinghua background, including 1 IEEE Fellow and 9 returnees with senior industry experience in the United States.
In 2016, Chen Zhenqi returned to the motherland and registered a chip company in Shenzhen, Nurixin, focusing on UWB chips.
The English name of Nurecien is NewRadio Technologies. Among them, NewRadio refers to 5G wireless air interface technology, literally meaning "new wireless", and at the same time contains the meaning of 5G-related technologies, Chen Zhenqi hopes that NewRichip can seize the opportunity on wireless communication chips.
Its business line UWB chip is good at centimeter-level precision positioning, can transmit data at high speed in a short distance, and has the characteristics of low power consumption and strong anti-interference ability, which can realize the position, distance and direction perception of various smart devices.
Strictly speaking, this is not a new technology. UWB's "past life" dates back to the 1960s, when the U.S. military used it for radar detection.
At the beginning of 2000, the short-pulse standard UWB chip of Time Domain, a UWB technology product and service provider in the United States, achieved transmission at a rate of 1Gbps within 3m, which was very cutting-edge at that time. However, the agreement and standard abortion on the UWB were not harmonized for a long time. In the early decade, there were a few small companies working on UWB chips, but the results were rare.
Around 2010, The DW1000 of Irish UWB chip supplier Decawave went into mass production, becoming the only UWB chip on the market at that time to truly achieve mass production on a large scale, but its mass production scale was not very large.
▲DW1000 chip
Due to the lack of maturity and cost advantages compared with other short-distance transmission technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi, UWB has not been able to obtain high market acceptance. In the early stage, UWB was more used in industrial scenes such as coal mines, tunnels, chemical plants, and nursing homes for high-precision positioning to ensure the safety of the wearer.
In the early days of Chen Zhenqi's business, UWB was still an unknown technology track. The potential of the consumer market has not yet been opened, and there is a gap between domestic enterprises and international leaders in key technologies, and the startups on the UWB chip track are facing many difficulties such as achieving technological breakthroughs, filling talent gaps, and obtaining customer recognition.
The turning point came in September 2019, when Apple installed a mysterious U1 chip for the first time in its flagship phone, the iPhone 11, saying that it could significantly improve spatial perception and allow devices over short distances to be accurately located. The technology behind this feature is UWB.
▲ In September 2019, Apple released the iPhone 11 equipped with UWB chips
"The UWB industry was an undercurrent before, and the iPhone 11 officially ignited this fire." Chen Zhenqi recalled.
At that time, Nurexin had reached its fourth year of existence. At the end of 2019, its fully self-developed UWB Big Ursa (UMAJ) SoC chip was successfully tape-out, becoming the first transceiver in China to be fully integrated and compatible with the latest IEEE 802.15.4z UWB industry standard system chip.
Following Apple, consumer electronics brands such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and OPPO have caught up, making UWB a small hit in the field of mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Then, in April 2021, Apple threw out the three-year-old "anti-loss artifact" AirTag tracker, pushing the popularity of UWB to a new peak; in May of the same year, Google announced that Android 12 also added a UWB-based digital car key function.
Mainstream automakers at home and abroad have also implemented "digital keys" based on UWB technology. UWB can prevent attacks from the physical bottom layer, has a high degree of security, has entered the field of international car specification chips, it is also the basic technology to achieve intelligent parking, location monitoring and other applications.
According to market research firm ABI Research, global shipments of built-in UWBs will be 143 million units in 2020, more than 200 million units in 2021, and are expected to grow to 1.3 billion units by 2026.
▲2020-2026 global built-in UWB product annual shipment forecast (data source market research company ABI Research)
The curtain has opened on consumer-grade UWB applications, and UWB chips are finally no longer an obscure niche chip track.
The development process of this industry has accelerated: in August 2019, the UWB standards organization FiRa Alliance was established; in January 2020, Apple supplier Qorvo was exposed to spending 400 million US dollars to acquire UWB chip supplier Decawave; in July 2020, the global technology organization Internet of Vehicles Alliance announced the finalization of its CCC Digital Key (Digital Key) version 3.0 specification... More and more iconic events are happening.
▲ Screenshot of some FiRa alliance members (image source is FiRa official website)
In the face of a huge potential market, domestic UWB chip companies are preparing for development, and Nureschip has also begun to emerge.
Second, the chip algorithm is grasped with both hands, and a number of UWB chips are listed this year
At the beginning of the business, Chen Zhenqi and his team established a "full self-research" development path. "The height of your key technology determines what kind of things you can do." Chen Zhenqi said.
Compared with UWB chips, Bluetooth chips and Wi-Fi chips, two more common short-range wireless communication system chips, are more mature in technological development, and UWB is still in the early stages of development.
▲Comparison of basic information of UWB, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth technology
In Chen Zhenqi's view, among the three, the technical difficulty of Bluetooth chips is low, and the technical difficulty of UWB and Wi-Fi6 and Wi-Fi7 is comparable. The minimum bandwidth of the UWB chip is 500MHz, the maximum bandwidth can reach 1.1GHz ~ 1.3GHz, and its bandwidth and frequency band are higher than those of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which will also bring many technical challenges.
He believes that by adhering to comprehensive and positive independent research and development, we can be closer to the market and quickly find the market value of products.
In this regard, Nureychip starts from product definition and the latest needs, grasps the chip and the algorithm at the same time, on the one hand, from the front-end packaging, radio frequency amplifier (PA), analog baseband to digital signal processing of each integrated circuit (IC) module are IP, on the other hand, from the perspective of the whole system to develop a variety of algorithms, and hardware optimization complement each other.
"All the chips we make are all self-developed IP." Chen Zhenqi said that due to the small ip restrictions, Nurixin is more flexible in the selection of foundries, can establish in-depth technical cooperation with foundries, and quickly optimize products according to new technical directions, thereby increasing its market acceptance.
Because the UWB chip market is not yet mature, the application scenarios are not clear enough, and the different application needs of the industrial and consumer markets are very different. Therefore, Nwrichip adheres to the "algorithm first" in the entire chip design process, that is, designing products from the application side and guiding the direction of chip hardware design and optimization through algorithms.
In order to improve the performance of UWB chips, Nurechip adopts an innovative anti-multipath algorithm, a large number of users fast positioning algorithm, and its self-developed algorithm can also support multi-band dynamic switching.
Schematic diagram of multipath effect
The multipath effect is a major problem of wireless communication, that is, when the wireless signal propagates on different paths, there is a time difference between the signals reaching the receiving end, which will cause mutual interference and distort the original signal.
In terms of coping with multipath effects, UWB is more stable than Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other technologies in indoor ranging because of its modulation method and signal value, but it still faces technical challenges. Before going abroad, Chen Zhenqi has conducted relevant technical research, based on the technical accumulation and algorithm optimization on the multipath channel model, to expand the functions and advantages of the chip.
In addition, Chen Zhenqi is also exploring new markets and technology opportunities in the field of wireless communications, including the completion of a number of high-value key core technology research and development reserves, as well as the layout of new technology research and development in the direction of 5G, 6G, satellite communications and millimeter wave communications.
In the past year, the overall team size of Nureatic has expanded by more than 50% compared with last year, of which the R&D team accounts for more than 60%.
"Nureychip is a technology company that makes UWB chip products, not a company that makes UWB chips." Chen Zhenqi stressed.
At present, NWCHIP has formed a service system based on UWB positioning communication system chips and smart antenna tuning chips, providing a full set of high-performance IC products including antenna tuners, 5G/B5G transceivers, data converters and IoT SoCs, and creating a fully self-developed technology platform NRTP (NewRadio-Technical-Platform) for high-end critical RF and analog hybrid IP required for communication chips.
▲Concept map of Ursa Major chip
Its core product, Ursa Major series UWB positioning communication system chip, integrates a full set of underlying software and hardware solutions, can achieve multi-channel transceiver, compatible with the latest IEEE 802.15.4z, support FiRa, CCC and other international standards, has been with the mainstream UWB equipment on the market to achieve interconnection and application compatibility.
UWB technology is mainly used in four major industrial fields: vertical industries such as industrial Internet, Internet of Things, smart cars, and smart phones.
At this stage, the Ursa Major chip is mainly used in the two major fields of smart phones and smart cars, while covering the application needs of object search positioning, mobile payment, device interconnection, indoor navigation, AR/VR, and industrial Internet. NRT81600 series and NRT81800 series chips developed by NHR Core for different application scenarios have completed trial mass production in 2021 and will be put on the market this year.
▲Ursa Major chip application layout
"This year is a critical period for the mass production and commercial landing of Nuriken's UWB chips." Chen Zhenqi said.
Third, cross-generation competition with international leading chips to promote the formulation of industry standards
At present, the development of the UWB chip industry is in an early stage, and the development of domestic chips is slightly lagging behind overseas, and in Chen Zhenqi's view, this "lag" gap is actually not large.
The product strategy adopted by Nureychip is to compete with foreign chips across generations, that is, the products designed now are benchmarked against the next generation of the world's leading UWB chip company.
Since the UWB chip industry is relatively cutting-edge, foreign leading enterprises and domestic UWB chip companies are basically from the market that enterprises are more familiar with and have a grasp of. However, the early accumulation of international leading enterprises in market channels and other aspects has formed a scale, which is also an objective gap between domestic UWB chip start-ups and leading enterprises.
According to Chen Zhenqi's sharing, at present, many domestic companies are doing local work on existing scenes or chip products, and then trying to target specific customers in some specific scenarios and applications.
He believes that UWB will become the standard technology for 5G smartphones, cars and various smart devices in the future.
It is true that the shipment volume of smart phones and IoT devices is extremely considerable, and the rapid growth of automobile demand for UWB chips, whether it is identity verification, non-sense unlocking, or object search positioning, asset tracking, has given UWB a huge market space to play an advantage. However, for now, the landing of UWB chips has not yet been fully rolled out, and the relevant infrastructure, industry standards, and ecological construction need to be further improved.
Therefore, in addition to technological innovation, Chen Zhenqi also led Nurichip to promote the progress of UWB in application and protocol.
He said that although Nurechip does not do terminal products, it will explore the expanding application scenarios of UWB chips through some application-oriented patents. For example, in May 2021, NWCH's invention patent for "method and device for directly controlling UWB equipment with a mobile phone embedded in a UWB module" was authorized by the State Intellectual Property Office. This is of positive significance for the localization of UWB chips for smartphones and related IoT devices.
▲The location relationship between smartphones embedded with UWB modules and AR modules and UWB smart devices
Chen Zhenqi believes that only by forming a consistent standard on the protocol can UWB be developed into a technology with explosive power and large application scenarios in the future. To this end, he is also actively promoting the drafting of UWB chip standards.
Conclusion: After the first fire, how far is the UWB chip from the outbreak?
With the successive launch of phenomenal products by mobile phones and auto giants, as well as the continuous rise in the call for domestic substitution of key chips, the domestic UWB chip industry has experienced a wave of "small climax". But so far, the application of this track can only be said to be beginning to take shape, and it is still a little less hot than the real large-scale outbreak.
Existing UWB chip start-ups must not only find a breakthrough path from the market and ecological advantages that the international chip giants have built, but also face competition from more new entrants.
The road ahead still needs to feel the stones to cross the river. Backed by the key technologies of self-research, Chen Zhenqi hopes that Nurechip will seize the market opportunities of UWB in the future, quickly optimize product research and development, improve the cost performance of its own chips, and reach the world-class level in the field of wireless communication chips.