Shipments are nearly 2 billion! How can local wireless communication chip companies break their monopoly?

Video of speech by Yang Yueming, deputy general manager of Panqi Microelectronics

Video source: Master Xin

*The following content is compiled and edited based on the transcript of Yang Yueming’s speech without changing the original meaning.

In today's Internet of Things (IoT) field, low-power long-distance communication technology has become one of the keys to industry development. In recent years, with the rapid development of IoT technology, the number of IoT devices has continued to increase, and the amount of data transmission has shown explosive growth. At the same time, the increasing maturity of the Internet of Things industry chain has also driven the integration of various communication technologies to become a trend. Among them, low-power narrowband Chirp IoT technology has attracted much attention from the industry due to its advantages of strong anti-interference and high sensitivity.

As the number one player in this field, Panqi Microelectronics began its research and exploration many years ago. With in-depth insights into the Internet of Things industry and rich technical experience, Panqi Microelectronics realized that low-power long-distance communication technology is the key to the Internet of Things. The bottleneck of Internet development. In order to solve this problem, the company has established a professional R&D team dedicated to researching new low-power long-distance communication technology.

During the research process, Panqi Microelectronics conducted in-depth exploration of the characteristics and advantages of Chirp signals. Based on the optimization and innovation of Chirp, the company launched a new modem technology ChirpIoT ^TM , as well as ChirpIoT ^TM terminal chips, gateways, modules and other products. Its self-developed ChirpIoT ^TM series products such as PAN3028, PAN3031, and PAN3029 have the characteristics of independent property rights, ultra-wide coverage, extremely low power consumption, strong anti-interference, independent networking, and high cost performance, and have successfully broken the technology monopoly of foreign companies. "In the field of industrial Internet of Things, there is LoRa internationally, and our products are comparable to it." Yang Yueming said.

Yang Yueming, deputy general manager of Panqi Microelectronics, gave an on-site speech

At present, the company has launched two generations of chips. The first generation is PAN3028 and PAN3031 launched in 2020; the second generation is PAN3029 and PAN3060 launched in September this year. Compared with the first generation, the second generation has higher speed and smaller size. packaging and other features. Judging from its results, the domestic replacement of LoRa chips has been initially achieved.

In terms of product advantages, Yang Yueming specifically introduced: "PAN3029 has a very special function called the hardware roll call function. When our receiving end receives a small Field, it can determine whether it is me. If it is me, it will start to accept , if it were not me, it would continue to sleep. When our hardware roll call function is started, it is shut down most of the time during the reception process. In the non-hardware roll call function mode, the average power consumption may be 3.25 mA. When matching, if it is me, it is only 0.37 mA, if it is not me, it is only 0.087 mA, saving more than 97% of power consumption, which is effective for some battery-based IoT applications such as meters, sensors, and tags. Save more than 70% of network power consumption and extend the service life of battery products several times.”

It is reported that PAN3029 supports half-duplex wireless communication, with operating frequency bands of 408~565MHz and 816~1080MHz. The chip has the characteristics of high anti-interference, high sensitivity, low power consumption and ultra-long transmission distance. Compared with conventional modulation technology, PAN3029 has significant advantages in blocking and adjacent channel selection, which can further improve communication reliability. At the same time, it also provides greater flexibility. Users can adjust the spread spectrum modulation bandwidth, spreading factor and error correction rate by themselves, effectively improving the trade-off between distance, anti-interference ability and power consumption of chips using conventional modulation technology. question.

Panqi Microelectronics’ first and second generation ChirpIoT ^TM chips

Source: Cut from Panqi Microelectronics’ speech PPT

In addition, judging from the distance performance of the team's test demonstrated by Yang Yueming, "In a base station scenario, we put it downstairs and tested it. We measured that at a distance of 6.2 kilometers, there was still a 75% packet reception rate. It The height above the ground is 0.7 meters. In the ground distance test, we measured 2.2 kilometers and the accuracy of bag collection was 75%. In the distance test by the lake, we placed it at the lake and stretched it to 5.4 kilometers. There is still a 65% chance of receiving the package.”

Chirp signal is a signal with special modulation, which has the advantages of high bandwidth efficiency, strong anti-multipath interference ability, and low power consumption. Panqi Microelectronics gradually developed the ChirpLAN ^TM protocol with independent intellectual property rights through in-depth research on the characteristics and implementation methods of Chirp signals.

On November 11, 2022, Panqi Microelectronics officially released its ChirpLAN ^TM protocol. According to reports, this protocol is an open source P2P or star wireless LAN protocol launched by Panqi Microelectronics based on its own ChirpIoT ^TM series of products with completely independent intellectual property rights. It has the characteristics of secure communication, convenient networking, low terminal power consumption, and long communication distance. It is widely used in application scenarios such as smart factories, smart meter reading, smart cities, smart warehousing, smart fire protection, smart agriculture, and smart environmental protection.

The main principle of the ChirpLAN ^TM protocol is to encode data information into Chirp signals and transmit data by sending Chirp signals. Due to the special modulation method of the Chirp signal, the signal can automatically adapt to channel changes during transmission and reduce multipath interference, thereby achieving long-distance and low-power data transmission. In addition, the ChirpLAN ^TM protocol also adopts an on-demand and reliable data sending and receiving mechanism to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data.

ChirpLANTM ^network protocol

Source: Cut from Panqi Microelectronics’ speech PPT

ChirpLAN ^TM follows the Apache 2.0 protocol. The protocol code and specifications are completely open and open source, and its network combination method is extremely flexible. According to reports, the ChirpLAN ^TM network protocol supports one-to-one and one-to-many connections under the direct network. There are three modes under star network:

(1) Mode A is the active reporting mode. The user sends data on demand, such as TA instructions or sending data regularly. When no data is sent, the RF is in a dormant state;

(2) Mode B is a periodic synchronization mode, supporting all the functions of Mode A, and supporting MAPM mode in downlink. The terminal turns on RX periodically, the gateway wakes up the terminal through the downlink time slot, and the terminal goes uplink through the designated time slot;

(3) Mode C is a full-speed operation mode with all the functions of Mode A and Mode B. It is a half-duplex mode. When the terminal is in non-TX mode, the RF is in RX mode to quickly respond to the data from the gateway.

In the ChirpLAN ^TM network test, Yang Yueming gave an example: "We did a simple test. The upper left corner of (PPT) is a 160 test suite. We use such a gateway, the number of concurrent channels is 8, it can quickly and quickly Data statistics development. Our gateway can support up to 5,000 nodes.” In addition, Yang Yueming also revealed the company’s latest progress—it is currently developing a low-power Mesh network, and non-low-power Mesh is already in testing. It is reported that low-power Mesh is used in many scenarios, especially in the smart home field.

ChirpLAN ^TM Network Test

Source: Cut from Panqi Microelectronics’ speech PPT

Talking about the current application of ChirpLAN ^TM , Yang Yueming said: "It is currently used in electricity, gas, fire protection, circuit breakers, meter boxes, water immersion, etc. It has many applications in the power field, especially the State Grid and Southern China Power Grid." Take the industrial application as a case - wireless water meter + concentrator solution. In this solution, each water meter reports data to the concentrator through wireless LAN, and the concentrator reports to the cloud through 4G. Concentrators are often installed in meter boxes to manage multiple water meters at the same location in multi-story corridors. The water meter only needs to go up and report it regularly, and the downlink data will only be sent when uplink occurs.

ChirpLAN ^TM is also widely used in other industries. For example, all alarm types in fire protection installations can be reported directly through the ChirpLAN ^TM gateway. It has strong penetrability. Generally, only one gateway is needed on three floors in a hospital. In addition, there are also fields such as smart homes, smart robots, smart medical care, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and new energy.

ChirpLAN ^TM application: wireless water meter + concentrator solution

Source: Cut from Panqi Microelectronics’ speech PPT

The importance of ChirpLAN ^TM in the field of IoT is self-evident. It can not only improve the performance and response speed of IoT devices, reduce the energy consumption of devices, but also ensure the stability and reliability of data transmission. These advantages make ChirpLAN ^TM an ideal transmission protocol for IoT devices, providing strong support for the development of IoT technology. In an environment where technologies tend to converge, and with the joint efforts of domestic low-power narrowband industry chain companies, Chirp narrowband IoT technology is expanding into more innovative application scenarios.

It can be seen that Panqi Microelectronics is relying on the technical advantages of the ChirpLAN ^TM protocol to achieve fruitful results in this field. In addition to the above-mentioned low-power long-distance ChirpIoT series, Panqi Microelectronics also has two major products: multi-protocol series and BLE-lite series.

According to reports, the BLE-lite series products are Panqi Microelectronics' 2.4G lightweight Bluetooth products, including single radio frequency transceiver chips and SoC-type chips with integrated MCUs. Their main functions can realize wireless communication in the 2.4G ISM frequency band. It is also compatible with Bluetooth Beacon packet format communication and can conduct two-way communication with smartphones; multi-protocol series products are self-developed by Panqi Microelectronics to support multiple wireless protocol connections, allowing the design of chips that meet market needs in different scenarios. The SoC chip with powerful core and flash resources supports 2.4 GHz wireless protocols, including BLE, BLE MESH, Zigbee, Thread, Matter, etc.

At this stage, the ChirpLAN ^TM protocol has been widely used in many fields such as smart homes, smart cities, and industrial automation. Panqi Microelectronics is actively promoting the application of ChirpLAN ^TM in IoT devices, jointly developing IoT solutions based on ChirpLAN ^TM protocol with many partners, and promoting the development of IoT communication technology.

With the continuous expansion of IoT applications and the diversified development of equipment, ChirpLAN ^TM will be widely used. At the same time, ChirpLAN ^TM 's high efficiency, high-speed data transmission performance and low power consumption will make it an ideal transmission protocol for IoT devices. ; The development of communication technologies such as 5G, 6G and the increasing number of Internet of Things devices will also continue to increase the requirements for communication performance and stability, thus providing a broader space for the development of ChirpLAN ^{TM technology.}