How can domestic Wi-Fi chips make up for the "lost decade"?

Since Wi-Fi 5 was launched in 2013, the gap between domestic Wi-Fi chips and industry leaders has widened due to the high technical difficulty and difficulty in introduction. Now, 10 years later, when Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek and other major manufacturers have announced the launch of Wi-Fi 7, most domestic manufacturers are still stuck at Wi-Fi 4. Although a number of Wi-Fi 6 chip startups have emerged, most of their products are still on the road of research and development.

“The past cannot be changed, but the future can still be pursued.” Is the gap between the domestic Wi-Fi chip industry and overseas leading technologies widening? Can the lost “decade” be recovered?

Wi-Fi 5 has been silent for ten years

Just as Rome was not built in a day, the gap was not formed suddenly.

From the development history of Wi-Fi, it has been 25 years. From the first generation of 802.11 standard in 1997 to the second generation IEEE 802.11b standard in 1999, Wi-Fi officially entered the public eye. Around 2002, the third generation 802.11g/a standard was launched; then from 2007, the 802.11n standard has been used, which is commonly known as Wi-Fi 4. Wi-Fi 5 came out in 2013, and Wi-Fi 6 officially debuted in 2019.

During this period, wireless technology has developed rapidly. Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Intel firmly occupied the leading position through acquisition or integration, and established their empire between 2001 and 2005. MediaTek, Realtek, and others came in first after fierce competition between 2007 and 2010, and their advantages have continued to this day.

On the other hand, in China, although Huawei HiSilicon took the lead, Espressif, Broadcom Integrated and others seized the opportunity in the field of Wi-Fi 4 IoT chips and made a strong debut, unfortunately, after the release of the fifth-generation Wi-Fi 5 standard, they missed the opportunity to expand their "results" due to various reasons, resulting in their "absence" from this market.

As Wi-Fi history turns to Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 6E, it has entered a period of rapid growth this year. Not only will the size of the consumer market grow, it will also become the main force of enterprise-level network access equipment. According to Gartner data, the scale of Wi-Fi 6 enterprise and small and medium-sized business users will increase from US$250 million in 2019 to US$5.22 billion in 2023, with a CAGR of 114%. The Wi-Fi Alliance also pointed out that more than 350 million Wi-Fi 6E devices will enter the market in 2022.

Jiwei Consulting also optimistically predicts that the global Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 6E terminal shipment ratio will exceed 60% in 2022. After countless heroes have failed in their competition, will the gap between mainland Wi-Fi 6 companies and overseas companies "continue" history or achieve a "reversal"?

Data source: Jiwei Consulting

Making judgments needs to be based on situations that are different from the past. As mentioned earlier, domestic Wi-Fi chip manufacturers have been surging in recent years. Not only are there a number of veterans fighting on the main battlefield, but dozens of Wi-Fi upstarts have also rushed into the domestic semiconductor boom.

Wan Yujing, General Manager of CEVA China, explained that compared with the first echelon, although HiSilicon has suffered an embargo, it has a relatively deep accumulation of technology. It is believed that they are still continuing to evolve their technology and are not necessarily outdated, so it cannot be concluded that the gap has widened; compared with the second echelon, there were fewer domestic players before, but in recent years, there have been many domestic manufacturers that have achieved mass production of Wi-Fi 4 chips. In recent years, many Wi-Fi start-up teams have emerged in China, including companies with strong technical background, experience accumulation, and operation services. Overall, the gap should be narrowing.

Li Ming believes that after years of accumulation and changes in the industry chain environment, the gap between China and mainstream manufacturers in the field of Wi-Fi 6 will gradually narrow. The technical gap is mainly reflected in IP maturity, Wi-Fi compatibility, and performance optimization experience in application scenarios.

In this regard, Zhao Yi, research director of Jiwei Consulting, also mentioned that the gap between domestic chip manufacturers is reflected in algorithms and RF front-end, but the country has made great progress in RF front-end in the past two years, and the overall gap should not have widened, but it should be noted that the iteration speed of Wi-Fi has accelerated.

However, Yang Yi, deputy general manager of Ruichengxinwei, held a different view. He said that Wi-Fi chips have always been a tough nut to crack in the semiconductor field, with high difficulty and large investment, especially in high-performance application areas such as routers. They have long been monopolized by international oligopolistic companies, and very few mainland companies and manufacturers have participated.

"At this point in time, the technical indicators of mass-produced Wi-Fi products produced by mainland manufacturers are close to the technical level of Wi-Fi 5 produced by international tier 1 manufacturers. As the market demand for data throughput increases, the Wi-Fi version will soon be updated to Wi-Fi 7. The technical threshold is getting higher and higher, which will widen the gap between mainland companies and overseas companies in the future," Yang Yi said cautiously.

RF IP Main Constraints

When it comes to the competition for Wi-Fi 6, we have to mention the increased technical challenges.

Wi-Fi 6 chips include SoC chips and RF front-end FEM. SoC is a highly integrated digital-analog hybrid CMOS chip, and FEM belongs to a special RF process, which is quite different.

Regarding the design challenges of Wi-Fi 6 chips, Zhong Lin, founder of Sanwuwei, once pointed out in an article that the difficulty of developing Wi-Fi 6 chips is concentrated on the underlying protocol/communication protocol + algorithm. Compared with Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5, the underlying protocol/communication protocol and algorithm of Wi-Fi 6 chips are more complex, and it is necessary to recruit more senior teams, understand more about the protocol, do more testing, and improve the design level. Among them, router SoC involves many new technical challenges, with the highest difficulty in research and development, and the RF front end is also a tough nut to crack.

Yang Yi focused on the analysis from the RF level. With the update and iteration of Wi-Fi versions, the requirements for RF are getting higher and higher, especially the requirements for the performance of CMOS power amplifiers and frequency synthesizer phase noise performance.

Xu Hao (pseudonym), a senior industry figure, further analyzed that the research and development of Wi-Fi 6 chips is even comparable to that of CPUs and GPUs, because Wi-Fi requires a team with many years of experience in digital, analog, and RF design, as well as algorithm development. In addition to overcoming these difficulties in developing ICs, it also requires full efforts to address underlying drivers, application interfaces, and support for multiple operating systems (OS). This will still be a long march for domestic manufacturers.

It is particularly important to point out that, just as the development of any chip is based on IP, Wi-Fi6 is no exception. Taking Wi-Fi IP as an example, it is mainly divided into baseband and RF IP. After several baptisms in the market, the baseband IP is now mainly supplied by CEVA. The RF IP manufacturer Catena has been acquired by NXP and no longer licenses to others. Imagination also provided Wi-Fi5's RF and baseband IP before, but this business was acquired by Nordic a few years ago. Currently, only a very small number of companies such as Cybertek in the United States can provide Wi-Fi5's RF IP, and new entrants such as mainland Ruichengxinwei and Taiwan Sirius-Wireless can provide Wi-Fi6's RF IP.

In this case, as Li Ming pointed out, most of the domestic Wi-Fi chip manufacturers choose to purchase CEVA's baseband IP, while the RF IP is mainly solved through self-research, by integrating MCU, Memory, power management and other designs to quickly launch chips and introduce them to end customers.

However, if we take the road of self-development in the development of Wi-Fi 6 chips, it can be said that "the road is long and difficult". Yang Yi mentioned that due to its high density, high throughput and multiple antennas, the development difficulty of Wi-Fi 6 has been greatly increased compared with the previous generation. In addition, the Wi-Fi 7 standard is about to be released, and some indicators of Wi-Fi 7 must be considered for integration, which puts more stringent requirements on RF. It takes a long time for existing Wi-Fi 6 chip manufacturers to get Wi-Fi 6 RF, and the investment will be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of yuan, which is less cost-effective than purchasing IP from an economic point of view.

"First, there are not many RF IPs and too few licensing channels; second, many companies think that RF may have opportunities through reverse engineering, but in fact this path is difficult to sustain forever," Xu Hao revealed.

It can be said that RF IP has become a clear constraint. Aiming at this demand, China's Ruichengxinwei and Taiwan's Sirius-Wireless have successively launched high-performance, low-power, and high-reliability Wi-Fi6 RF IP. "As an IP manufacturer, we hope to help Wi-Fi6 manufacturers reduce development difficulties and further speed up product launches." Yang Yi emphasized.

According to industry insiders, the price of RF IP from European and American manufacturers is more than 2.5 million US dollars. Xu Hao suggested that domestic IC design companies should focus on the front end, speed up the time to market by adopting IP, and achieve a positive cycle of profit in mass production and shipment of Wi-Fi chips as soon as possible, which will be more positive for the development of the company and the industry.

Although RF IP seems to have "broken the deadlock", Wi-Fi chip manufacturers may still have concerns. Zhong Lin analyzed that SoC chips have more considerations for RF, and RF is strongly related to technology and manufacturing process. Different technology and manufacturing process have a greater impact on RF indicators, while digital baseband is less affected by technology and manufacturing process. The simulation accuracy of digital circuits is also high, but RF simulation is difficult to guarantee. IP manufacturers can provide RF IP references for Wi-Fi6 chip manufacturers, but it will still take time to integrate them.

Wan Yujing also expressed his own views on this. On the one hand, domestic manufacturers have market demand for RF IP, but unlike digital IP, RF IP is strongly related to technology. Considering the continuous evolution of technology, RF IP manufacturers need to provide IP+ service capabilities. On the other hand, if Wi-Fi chip manufacturers rely on third-party IP, they will be more passive in the continuous iteration of products. In the long run, the leading Wi-Fi chip manufacturers may move towards self-developed RF IP, which will be more controllable and more competitive at the technical level.

From the perspective of SoC chip manufacturers, Li Ming believes that cooperation with RF IP manufacturers may be suitable for some Wi-Fi specification chips. For high performance and complex specifications, deep integration of baseband and RF is required to launch Wi-Fi6 chip solutions with optimized architecture design and process technology.

Divide your forces and attack, and the one who survives will be the king

It can be said that technological breakthroughs are only the first step in a long journey, and the "advance" path of domestic Wi-Fi 6 chip manufacturers still needs long-term planning.

In terms of progress, Li Ming said that the Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to launch the certification of the Wi-Fi 7 standard at the end of 2023, which is about 4 and a half years away from the release of the Wi-Fi 6 certification in September 2019. Generally, major manufacturers involved in the formulation of Wi-Fi standards will release new products before the new standard is officially launched. Huawei HiSilicon is the fastest in China, and its contribution to the Wi-Fi 7 standard is the largest among all participants, but it is unable to produce Wi-Fi 7 chips due to sanctions.

Therefore, Li Ming further added that other domestic Wi-Fi chip manufacturers should focus on following the Wi-Fi6/6E standards, with the goal of launching mass-produced chips, and some chip specifications should integrate some Wi-Fi7 standard functions.

It should be pointed out that Wi-Fi chips have different application areas, involving smartphones, routers, the Internet of Things, etc. Different sub-applications have different requirements for Wi-Fi6 chip specifications. In addition, Wi-Fi chips have different combinations, such as pure connection chips, connection chips plus multimedia applications, and a variety of wireless communication combos, all of which have great development space, and the difficulty of product platforms and customer introduction also varies greatly, so it is even more necessary to divide and conquer.

From the perspective of all the "players", due to the high difficulty of developing router Wi-Fi 6 chips, only Huawei HiSilicon, Sichang Communication, Longli Semiconductor, Zunpai, and Speedcom are making efforts. In addition, the manufacturers in mainland China that develop Wi-Fi 6 end-side chips mainly include Spreadtrum, Speedcom, Espressif, ASR, Rockchip, Broadcom Integrated, Lianshengde, and Southern Silicon Valley, and the companies focusing on RF FEM include Kangxi, Xinbaite, Sanwuwei, etc. With the emergence of new upstarts, the firepower of domestic manufacturers is about to be fully unleashed.

As for the trade-offs, Li Ming's view is that the current main shipments of Wi-Fi 6 chips are concentrated in mobile phones, laptops, routers and gateways, and streaming media applications (such as smart TVs). These major markets have high performance requirements for Wi-Fi 6 chips, and the platform cooperation is highly bound. They have always been occupied by Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek and Intel, which makes it relatively difficult.

"Both veterans and new recruits in mainland China are developing Wi-Fi 6 chips, because the Wi-Fi 4 IoT market has been mostly occupied by mainland manufacturers. It is expected that Wi-Fi 6 IoT will continue the same situation, but it will face competition from American, especially Taiwanese manufacturers, in mid-to-high-end Wi-Fi 6 chips. This will greatly test the technology research and development and customer development capabilities of start-ups, but I believe that breakthroughs will be made from easy to difficult in the next few years." Li Ming said optimistically.

Regarding the future catch-up, Yang Yi believes that Huawei HiSilicon is one of the few mainland chip companies that has mastered high-performance Wi-Fi technology. At present, a number of Wi-Fi chip start-ups have emerged in the mainland, with both technology and funds. In the foreseeable future, mainland chip companies will be able to catch up in the research and development of advanced Wi-Fi chips, which is expected to take three to five years; to achieve surpassing, leading companies need to take up the banner.

"In the past, only one company stood out, which was not necessarily a good thing for the prosperity of the industry and the security of the supply chain. Now, a large number of chip companies have entered this track, which can be described as a hundred boats competing for the current. Although some bubbles are inevitable, it will generally help to improve the overall level of the industry." Wan Yujing emphasized, "There may still be a hundred flowers blooming in the future, but after competition and the elimination of the sand, there will definitely be integration in the future. As an extremely complex chip, domestic manufacturers need to continuously iterate on Wi-Fi chips. In the end, only by calming down, continuously evolving and iterating step by step, and persisting in going forward can the winners be the last one standing."