In the past decade, Apple has led the entire smart mobile phone wave. At the same time, the iPad and Airpods headphones launched by Apple have also attracted the imitation of the same industry. While creating these devices or adding new features to these devices, they have also driven several waves of the chip industry. Taking fingerprint recognition, face recognition and true wireless headphones as examples, these functions and devices have made fingerprint recognition chips, VCSEL and TWS Bluetooth chips very popular respectively.
On this year's Apple iPhone 1, they quietly brought the U1 chip, and the "U" in the U1 chip refers to ultra-wideband radio technology (UWB) technology. Apple has the past trend leading craze continued to repeat history in UWB chips?
The first generation iPhone - a small test of capacitive screen touch chip
On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced the launch of the first generation iPhone at the San Francisco Apple Global Software Developer Annual Meeting . iPhones have broken through the difficulties of capacitive touch screens and multi-touch technology, and the first generation of iPhones have brought a touch revolution to the entire mobile phone industry. Since 2008, with the leading role of iPhone/iTouch in mobile phone and portable electronic devices, capacitive screen touch chips have achieved significant growth driven by the downstream application market. The iPad released in 2010 brought a new application market to capacitive touch screens, bringing the capacitive screen touch chip market to a new round of significant growth.
capacitor screen, full name is capacitive touch screen, commonly known as "hard screen", is a four-layer composite glass screen. From the inside to the outside, the first layer is ITO (nano-indium tin metal oxide), which is used to ensure the working environment and is a shielding layer; the second layer is glass; the third layer is also an ITO coating for the working surface; the fourth layer is a silicone glass protective layer. Capacitor screens work by using the human body's current sensing.
Among the chip suppliers upstream of capacitive touch, in addition to international manufacturers such as Atmel, Cypress, and Xintusi Synaptics, domestic touch chip manufacturers are also emerging one after another. Domestic touch chips such as Shenzhen Zhuolian Micro Technology, Regent Micro Electronics, Siliwei, Huiding Technology , Duntai and Jichuang North have also achieved good results. Especially Huiding Technology , which successfully gained the first pot of gold for transformation on touch screen chips, and started their brilliant journey on mobile phone related chips. This is a later story!
iPhone 5s - Leading China's fingerprint recognition chip to the top of the world
Since Apple launched the iPhone 5s with fingerprint recognition in in 2013, fingerprint unlocking methods have instantly become popular. mobile phones equipped with fingerprint recognition have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. At that time, Apple had already made a "scheming" for itself. In 2012, it took the leader in fingerprint recognition authen tech to supply its own mobile phone . While fingerprint unlocking is so popular, the Android formation also wants to produce fingerprint recognition mobile phone , which must look for other fingerprint recognition chip manufacturers, which has created the rise of FPC.
FingerPrint Cards (FPC) is a fingerprint recognition technology company in Sweden. It was established in 1998 and its patent is mainly capacitive fingerprint recognition. The hero who really triggered the explosion of FPC was actually Huawei. After FPC's fingerprint chip was applied on Huawei Mate7 in 2014, it then ushered in rapid development. By 2015, FPC almost monopolized the fingerprint chip market of Android mobile phone .
However, with the continuous encroachment of more and more domestic fingerprint chip manufacturers, such as HSR, Siliwei, BYD, Mindray, Duntai, etc., FPC has gradually lost its downward trend in the price war. According to Guosen Securities, by 2017, HSR caught up with the FPC market share reached 31%, becoming the largest fingerprint chip supplier in the world's Android camp, which is a great encouragement for the domestic chip industry.
Although Apple gave up fingerprint recognition from iPhone X and changed face recognition, the supply chain is difficult to quickly help Android formation reach maturity in a short period of time. Under the influence of the actual conditions of plus the full-screen trend of , domestic manufacturers have begun to make efforts to find a compromise solution - under-screen fingerprint recognition technology.
Since the on-screen fingerprint recognition began to rise in the smart mobile phone market last year, domestic first-tier mobile phone brand flagships have also joined. Under-screen fingerprint recognition chips have also formed a competitive landscape dominated by domestic companies. Currently, the main optical under-screen fingerprint recognition technology chip manufacturers include Huiding, Siliwei, Luoji, etc., and Taiwan chip manufacturers include ATV, Duntai, Lianyong and Yilong Die, etc., under-screen fingerprint recognition are also focused on.
In the field of under-screen optical fingerprint, Huiding Technology bravely breaks into the "no man's land", Huiding's under-screen optical fingerprint recognition technology integrates the optical fingerprint sensor into the OLED display, realizing the technological innovation of "screen is fingerprint recognition". Without the need to design physical buttons, users can directly touch the designated area of the mobile terminal display to achieve fingerprint recognition. With the arrival of 5G, Zhang Fan, chairman of Huiding Technology , recently revealed at the first half of 2019 financial report disclosure investors and media exchange meeting that Huiding will launch an under-screen fingerprint 5G mobile ultra-thin solution to meet the new design and stacking requirements proposed by 5G.
iPhone X——3D facial recognition wave
Since the launch of iPhone X, Apple 's facial recognition has completely replaced fingerprint recognition, and it has announced that fingerprint recognition will no longer be used. The structured light 3D facial recognition technology it uses has also attracted the entire mobile phone industry to follow.
In terms of facial recognition, domestic manufacturers are chasing the first Android 3D structured light mobile is the Xiaomi 8 exploration version. Unlike the speckled structured light solution of iPhone X, the Xiaomi 8 exploration version adopts an encoded structured light solution, but Xiaomi 8 cannot support face payment yet; in contrast, Huawei Mate 20 Pro has added the technical application of 3D structured light and adopts the mainstream speckled structured light solution, which not only can achieve 3D face recognition unlocking, but also has payment-level security in terms of security; in addition, Huawei's Honor Magic2 has also introduced 3D structured light.
As the first large-scale mass-produced 3D structured light technology in the Android market, OPPO Find X can be said to have achieved a dual consideration of practical application and design. Due to the innovative dual-track periscope structural design, the notch screen is removed, and it can also support WeChat and Alipay payment functions; at Shanghai MWC in 2018, vivo released its 3D TOF technology, which is reported to have many advantages over structured light. In any case, under the leadership of Apple , this started another carnival. For example, in terms of VCSEL suppliers, there are Lumentum, Finisar, II-VI, ams subsidiary Princeton Optronics and Philips Photonics, and Huaxin, Zonghui Xinguang, Qianmu and Ruixi Technology also join this market in China.
Airpods—Low Energy Bluetooth Chip Carnival
According to Gartner's latest forecast in November 2018, global smart wearable device shipments will increase by 26% year-on-year to 225 million pieces in 2019, of which ear wear devices will increase by 36% year-on-year to 460 million pieces. It is expected that the compound growth rate of smart wearable device shipments will remain around 26% in the next three years, but the compound growth rate of ear wear devices (including TWS headphones) will increase to 50.88%. In 2022, ear wear devices represented by the Airpods series will replace smart watches and become the product with the highest proportion in the wearable industry, accounting for more than 4% of the total shipment volume of 30html.
To talk about the rise of TWS in recent years, Apple AirPods has definitely made an indelible contribution. This technically refers to the solution of mobile phone connecting to the main headset and then connecting the slave headset through Bluetooth wirelessly to realize the real wireless separation of the left and right channels of Bluetooth. But from the perspective of chip suppliers, there are also many flowers blooming, with different players at mid-, high and low ends.
In addition to Apple itself, the third-party and most mature technology is the CSR, a giant in the Bluetooth audio market (acquired by Qualcomm in August 2015), and is also one of the most mainstream TWS solutions in the market at present; currently, the Bluetooth audio market accounts for a large proportion, and it is more accepted by the public in terms of cost and technology. Luoda AIROHA (belongs to MediaTek and was MTK in February 2017 Acquisition); next is Hengxuan BES and Realtek. Currently, many major domestic manufacturers are using the BES23 series for development, including Huawei II; the other companies include: Guangzhou Ankai Anyka, Zhuhai Juli, Shanghai BK, Zhuhai Jieli, RDA, Zhongke Lanxun, etc., but they can also divide a small piece of cake in the TWS audio market; even Unigroup Zhanrui is also attacking TWS headphone Bluetooth chips, and its Ivy 5882 is very competitive in terms of performance and price.
iPhone11—Will UWB be the next "leader"?
iPhone 11 release, maybe you are following as the "bath heater" camera, or the "toothpaste-squeezing" innovation, or the A13 chip that may be awesome, but have you noticed the new U1 chip of Apple ? What can U1 chips do? What is UWB technology?
The so-called UWB is Ultra Wideband, ultra-wideband technology. We all know that the general communication system uses a high-frequency carrier to modulate a narrowband signal, and the actual bandwidth of the communication signal is not high. Unlike traditional communication technology, UWB can use non-sine wave narrow pulses in the order of nanoseconds or even microseconds to transmit data. Therefore, it is called a revolutionary progress in the radio field by industry experts and is the mainstream technology of short-distance wireless communication in the future. The bandwidth it uses is above 500MHz.
. According to the official website of Apple , when talking about the iPhone 11 series products, it was described: "The newly designed U1 chip of Appple uses ultra-wideband technology, which allows iPhone 11 Pro to have space perception capabilities, can sense other nearby Appple devices equipped with U1 chips, and accurately determine their positional relationship. This is like adding another perception capability to the iPhone, which will bring many exciting new features."
" has U1 chip and iOS 13. When using airdrop, just point your iPhone to other people’s iPhone, and the system will prioritize the other party, allowing you to share files more quickly. This is just the beginning, and there are many things that people expect."
Anxin Securities analyst Hu Youwen pointed out in the research report that UWB has many advantages such as strong anti-interference performance, high transmission rate, low power consumption, low transmission power and high security. Currently, its functions mainly include automatic access control, location positioning services, and device connection services. Application scenarios mainly include AR/VR, prisons, factories, parking, precision marketing, hospitals, V2X, etc.
Oriental Securities analyst Kuai Jian pointed out in his research report that in the to B market, the UWB technology industry chain is relatively simple and can be divided into two links: chips and solutions. Some companies are even engaged in the complete layout of chips and solutions. In the To C market, the UWB technology industry chain is forming multiple links such as chips, modules, and whole machines. In addition, UWB technology has also opened up new markets for FPC, functional structural parts and other industries.
Recently, according to China Securities Journal, China Overseas Da’s subsidiary Lianrui Electronics and Huawei officially signed a contract with the “Huawei UWB Mobile Wireless Anti-theft Project”. This is the first time that UWB (ultra-wideband) high-precision positioning technology is applied to the mobile phone retail industry, which also means that the purchase experience of the mobile phone anti-theft chain has always been limited to the mobile phone anti-theft chain will become a thing of the past.
Speaking of UWB chip suppliers, this time the iPhone 11 uses Decawave. Decawave is the only UWB positioning chip supplier in the world. Its market share is as high as 99%, and its users are in Ireland, China, France, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and other countries.
. The domestic UWB positioning chip research and development started late. There is currently no manufacturer in China that produces UWB positioning chips on a large scale. Most of the domestic UWB positioning chips come from Decawave, and there are also NXP and fine electronics. Among them, Jingwei Electronics released the first domestically-controllable UWB positioning chip and module on March 9 this year.Whether the addition of
Apple can make UWB, which has been on the market for more than ten years, truly become popular, and whether it can lead another chip craze, remains to be observed later.
Conclusion
To sum up, Apple is the "leader in selling goods" in the chip industry! This is enough to prove that after having an electronic terminal product that is appealing in the market, every time they expand a new function, the promotion to upstream chip manufacturers is huge. This is also one of the important reasons why the domestic mobile phone -related chip supply chain can develop so fast. But we should also see that in fact, , Apple has also failed attempts, such as 3D Touch, which has not been able to become popular.
But what is certain is that innovation is an important driving force for the advancement of the industry.
*Disclaimer: This article is original by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion. The reprint of the Semiconductor Industry Observer is only to convey a different view, and does not mean that the Semiconductor Industry Observer agrees or supports this view. If you have any objections, please contact the Semiconductor Industry Observer.
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