"5.4 billion, which is the shipment volume of Bluetooth devices in 2023, basically reaching the level of one person on earth. Among them, the annual shipments of Bluetooth low power (ble) devices will exceed 1.6 billion, and achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27% from 2018 to 2023. Smart home, beacon and asset tracking, emerging Internet of things (IOT) applications provide a huge push, and the emergence of new applications such as ble audio will also provide greater market opportunities.
In the ble market, the layout of foreign giants has been for many years, and the emerging domestic chip forces are also trying their best to catch up. Who will be the leader?
The chosen son
Smart door locks, shared bicycles, remote controls, bracelets, what is the largest market for ble chips?
"That must be Bracelet products." Li Hongyu, founder of Hefei Lianrui microelectronics, said without hesitation. Since Xiaomi Bracelet detonated the market, the bracelet market has made rapid progress all the way. According to statistics, in the first quarter of 2019, the shipment of Xiaomi bracelets alone reached 5.3 million units. Xiang Jianjun, founder of Chengdu ruichengxin micro, told reporters: "the wearable market represented by bracelets, after the growth in the past four or five years, the monthly peak consumption of ble chips is close to 20KK." This number, even in all types of chips, is a high level.
The obvious reason why bracelets favor ble is low power consumption. The latest ble chip has a sleep current of Na level and a working current of Ma level, which will bring an ultra long life time to the bracelet.
In several other indicators, ble upgraded to version 5.1 also has strong competitiveness. In terms of transmission rate, ble reaches 2Mbps and can be transmitted through. Although the WiFi rate is high, the transmission capacity of control applications is not strong. ZigBee, Nb IOT, Lora and sigfox are all at the level of about 250kbps, not at the same level. In terms of transmission distance, ble can reach the level of 50m indoors, which is better than that of Wi Fi under high transmission power. In terms of networking capability, ble mesh networking can reach 65000 in theory and thousands of nodes in actual measurement. Moreover, the characteristic of mesh network is that nodes are equal, and the collection and control within the network can be digested within the network.
Even in the face of Bluetooth classics, ble is still superior in power consumption, speed and cost. Therefore, since Bluetooth 4.0, the Bluetooth alliance has been adding various attributes to ble. Unconsciously, ble has become the upstart of short-range wireless communication technology.
Red sea or blue sea
If you search for Bluetooth low power consumption, many manufacturers and products will come into view, so is this market a red sea?
"Ble market is definitely not the Red Sea." Li Hongyu denied this conclusion, but he also said that the market is divided. "Foreign chips have high prices because of their performance advantages, while domestic chips are at the level of low price competition."
Xiang Jianjun also agrees with this view: "there are more and more players in the ble market, resulting in the decline of chip prices year by year, which often gives people the impression that the ble market is a red sea."
According to him, at this stage, domestic ble chips are mainly concentrated in the middle and low-end wearable market. The price war is fierce, and there is a trend in the Red Sea market; For the high-end wearable market, such as Xiaomi Huawei Lexin, a brand terminal manufacturer, are currently occupied by foreign enterprises Nordic and dialog. Their new ble chips are priced at more than US $1, with good shipments and gross profit margin, which can be called the Bluetooth market.
"Strictly speaking, most ble markets currently belong to the blue ocean market of high-speed growth and new applications, and a few homogeneous competitive markets with low-speed growth are close to the red ocean market." Xiang Jianjun concluded.
In addition to wearable devices, ble whirlwinds have been blowing in many industries. The first is the automotive industry. Since 2018, up to 80% of new vehicles have been equipped with Bluetooth connection function, and it has become a trend to equip ble on car keys; The second is intelligent lighting. Using ble technology and mesh networking mode, the intelligent networking of lighting can be realized by installing an app on the smart phone; In addition, ble is standard for smart door locks that are hot in urban and rural areas in China; Even in some traditional Bluetooth markets, such as PC peripherals, ble also began to replace classic Bluetooth because it has the characteristics of lower power consumption and faster and convenient pairing connection.
From the perspective of future growth space, ble is definitely a blue ocean.
Low prices are not all bad things
Even if the Red Sea market is not included, the situation of domestic ble chips is also full of challenges and opportunities.
Li Hongyu told reporters that the market share of domestic ble chips is only 20% - 30%, and large international manufacturers such as Nordic, dialog, Ti, cypress and CSR (acquired by Qualcomm) dominate.
This is also related to the late start of domestic manufacturers in this direction. In 2016, three ble companies in China produced and shipped in mass quantities, namely tailing microelectronics, Broadcom integration and Chengdu shengxinwei (former Beijing shengyuanda). In 2017, Beijing angruiwei (former Beijing hantianxia) and Juwei were added. At present, the monthly shipments of these five companies are at KK level, which has crossed an important threshold. Subsequently, new manufacturers such as Hefei Lianrui micro, Juxin, Fengjia micro and furuikun joined.
At present, domestic manufacturers have no absolute strength to challenge international manufacturers. In terms of revenue in 2018, Nordic reached US $262 million, while the top three domestic manufacturers added up to US $510 million. We can see the big gap.
Large international manufacturers take the medium and high-end route, and the average price of ble chips increases year by year. Domestic manufacturers continue to cut prices because of the increase in entrants. At present, the average price of domestic ble SOC chip is US $0.45, and the price range covers us $0.3 to US $0.8. If you want to expand to the module, the low-end simple universal Bluetooth transparent module can be sold for 4 yuan, and the customized module can be sold for more than 10 yuan or even dozens of yuan.
The influence of things is always good and bad. The reduction of chip price also has a beneficial side. "While reducing the gross profit margin of chip manufacturers, it can also drive a larger application market and attract more customers to use Bluetooth chips. In turn, it can reduce the cost of chip manufacturers, improve the overall gross profit of the industry and promote the rapid development of the Internet of things." Xiang Jianjun thinks so.
Interestingly, large international manufacturers also began to use their brains in the low price range. Dialog recently released a ble chip with only $0.50, which should cover low-cost remote control, PC accessories, toys, food / drug cold chain monitoring, item tracking in hospitals, factories and distribution centers, replacing active RFID and other markets.
"This chip may have a gross profit of about 50%." Li Hongyu has made an estimate. He thinks the product positioning of this chip is very accurate. However, this chip will not have a great impact on domestic manufacturers. "This chip is mainly aimed at the long tail market. The consumption in a single field is not very large, and there is little focus on domestic chips." Li Hongyu said.
Low power consumption, not low performance
Ble's lower cost does not mean that performance has to be compromised. Like other wireless protocols, ble is the foundation of IOT. According to the understanding of mark de clercq, director of low-power connection business department of dialog semiconductor: "the whole Internet of things is a pyramid. The amount of equipment at the bottom of the pyramid will be large. The higher up, the higher the high-end, the smaller the amount of equipment used and the higher the cost." Ble serves a large number of tower base equipment. If the tower base is unstable, the tower body is dangerous. The power consumption of ble chip should be low and the performance should not be poor.
The reason why most domestic ble chips are difficult to enter the vision of domestic Bracelet manufacturers is that they do not pass the power consumption. According to insiders, in 2018, a domestic brand Bracelet manufacturer wanted to find a domestic ble chip to replace the products of foreign manufacturers. It took great effort to find a domestic chip that met the requirements. This can also be seen from the disassembly reports of many bracelets. The main products of well-known brands use dialog or Nordic chips. The power consumption is too large to import wearable products that are very sensitive to this, which is also the main reason why the wearable market with a consumption of more than 10 KK is mainly occupied by foreign capital.
Another reason is that the domestic ble chip is not stable enough. The specific performance is that the chip integrated MCU often crashes and restarts, the connection is unstable, easy to drop, and the compatibility is poor. Xiang Jianjun believes that these problems are directly proportional to the mass production time of ble manufacturers. "Generally speaking, it takes at least half a year for a ble chip to be polished from the so-called mass production of chip manufacturers to the real mass shipment to customers," he said. International manufacturers discussed production early, polished in the market for a long time and performed well, while domestic manufacturers, especially new mass production manufacturers, were slightly insufficient because of the late mass production time. "
The threshold is better than that. It's hard to master. Li Hongyu said that ble chip is similar to the current MCU, which is easy to develop, but it is difficult to do fine. Ble chip can be understood as a ble RF plus an MCU chip. The core RF part needs to be developed by experienced engineers, which is relatively lacking in China. At the same time, there is a big gap between domestic chip MCU and international manufacturers in terms of user optimization.
In terms of technical support, ble manufacturers also rely on a large number of FAE personnel to implement. For a large number of small and medium-sized customers, domestic manufacturers are often absent due to the lack of FAE personnel. At the same time, they do not have rich documents and good technical training. As a result, customers generally think that the technical support of domestic ble manufacturers is not good. This is also very worthy of domestic manufacturers' attention.
Heart of chip
Modern chip design has been a bit similar to assembled LEGO. Purchasing a large number of ready-made IP saves the design company a lot of energy, and ble chip design is no exception. Therefore, the level of domestic ble IP also determines the performance of ble chip.
Xiang Jianjun told reporters that in the domestic ble IP market, digital baseband and modulation and demodulation are usually mainly provided by foreign IP manufacturer CEVA. Most ble manufacturers in China use CEVA's digital baseband IP, and a few manufacturers develop digital baseband IP by themselves or choose other digital baseband IP.
It is another scene in the field of RF IP. Previously, there was no special IP manufacturer in China, which was mainly developed by chip manufacturers themselves. In view of the high development threshold of RF, all ble manufacturers have invested a lot. Xiang Jianjun said: "generally speaking, the investment in developing a ble chip from project startup to mass production and shipment is generally between 20 million and 50 million RMB, and the time is generally three years or more. In addition, RF has high requirements for technology accumulation. The RF of each family has great differences in performance, power consumption and cost. It costs a lot of human and material resources and may not be able to obtain good results. "
However, this situation may have to be improved. Ruichengxin recently launched a ble RF IP, which has significant advantages in performance, power consumption and cost, allowing users to launch products quickly and well and occupy the market.
According to the information released, the RF area of this IP is very small, less than 0.5mm2; At the same time, the power consumption is lower, the RF receiving power consumption is 6MW, and the RF transmitting power consumption is 9mw when the output is 0dbm. Moreover, ruichengxin can flexibly customize IP on any process platform according to customer needs, so as to make customers' products more differentiated.
In terms of overall design, the level of domestic chips is also improving rapidly. Take the $0.50 chip as an example, "we can surpass it in mass production." Li Hongyu said with confidence.
Go your own way
For domestic manufacturers, to get out of the vicious circle of ble low price competition, they need to explore more ideas.
Xiang Jianjun summarized three feasible development directions:
1、 Go to very low cost. The low-end market is the foundation of domestic chips. It is not humiliating to make low-end chips. On the contrary, only through continuous technological innovation and process evolution can we achieve extreme low cost. With the growth of ble market year by year, the consumption in the low-end market at the bottom of the pyramid increases the most and accounts for the largest proportion. It is the most realistic way for domestic ble manufacturers, especially start-ups, to quickly launch products in the low-end market under the condition of insufficient funds.
2、 Go high. In the case of strong financial strength or accumulation in place, hold high and fight high, polish the products well, face the high-end market with high gross profit margin, and compete with large international manufacturers. Because high-end customers have higher requirements for products, this method will be very difficult in the early stage of R & D and promotion. However, once the introduction is successful, the market will be relatively stable and the gross profit margin will be relatively high.
3、 Go to differentiation. Ble SOC, also known as wireless MCU, has the market attribute of MCU, which is different from general-purpose chips. Differentiated customized chips mainly attack the niche market and find a unique way to avoid the fierce competition of general-purpose chips. This requires experienced marketing personnel to define the product in place and strong technical support.
In fact, while practicing their internal skills, domestic ble manufacturers are also looking for their own way. In particular, many manufacturers have begun to try the long tail markets such as remote controls and PC accessories mentioned above.
In addition, another direction is "going out". Li Hongyu told reporters: "we have begun to enter the Japanese market and have been recognized by several major customers." Going to sea can also open up a new world for domestic chips.
The continuous growth of ble market has attracted the attention of many giants. On September 27, Huawei announced that it had also entered the market with BT / ble dual-mode 5.1 wearable chip - Kirin A1. This chip can support both TWS headphones and bracelets. Although this chip is produced and sold by itself for the time being, who can guarantee that it will not enter the open market in the future?
In this cold winter, ble chip market is extremely hot“
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