The battle of Wi-Fi 6 chips among the four 5G baseband giants

While most people's phones are still using Wi-Fi 5 networks, Wi-Fi 6 has quietly arrived. Last February, Samsung released the Galaxy S10, which was one of the first phones to support the Wi-Fi 6 standard. The iPhone 11 series released in September last year also supported the Wi-Fi 6 standard.

Recently, Xiaomi 10 and Huawei Mate Xs have also announced support for Wi-Fi 6, and Xiaomi and Huawei's Wi-Fi 6 routers have also been unveiled one after another.

Like 5G, Wi-Fi 6 technology still needs several years to mature. Standing at the beginning of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 technology, we need to understand the value of these two latest wireless connection technologies and the future competitive situation. It is worth noting that Wi-Fi technology is becoming more important in the 5G era, and the four major 5G baseband giants will also become the most competitive wireless communication technology players in the AIoT era.

Unlike the 3G era when there were many players, in the 5G era, the only companies in the world that can provide baseband chips are Qualcomm, MediaTek, Unisoc, Huawei and Samsung. Among them, Huawei does not directly provide 5G baseband chips to the outside world. The 5G baseband market has become a battlefield for competition among a few top players.

A similar situation also occurred in the Wi-Fi 6 market. In 2019, many mergers and acquisitions in the global semiconductor industry were related to Wi-Fi 6. In March, ON Semiconductor announced the acquisition of Quantenna for US$1.07 billion. ON Semiconductor hopes to combine Quantenna's Wi-Fi technology and software to create a powerful platform to meet the needs of the fast-growing low-power connection market in industrial and automotive applications.

In May, NXP Semiconductors announced that it would acquire Marvell Technology's wireless connectivity business for US$1.76 billion in cash.

In June, Infineon announced that it would acquire Cypress for 9 billion euros (about 10.1 billion U.S. dollars), which has a differentiated product portfolio including microcontrollers, software and connectivity components.

In other words, whether it is 5G or Wi-Fi 6, it has become a game that only giants can participate in.

The characteristics and importance of 5G are not the focus of this article, but many people will certainly wonder, 5G is faster, has lower latency, and can connect more devices, why is Wi-Fi not replaced by 5G but more important?

5G can indeed provide better wireless connections, but the cost of 5G bandwidth will be significantly higher than the relatively lightweight Wi-Fi 6 technology. Replacing Wi-Fi with 5G is not an economical choice. More importantly, emerging applications are also advancing along with the development of wireless communication technology. The industry generally believes that 5G will enable the rapid development of applications such as AR/VR, cloud gaming, and high-definition video, and will give rise to more applications that require large bandwidth and low latency.

Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts that by 2021, more than half (56%) of connected flat-panel TVs will be 4K TVs, while 4K TVs only accounted for 15% of connected flat-panel TVs in 2016. This means that 4K TVs and 4K videos will bring more data transmission requirements, and Wi-Fi will transmit more data.

Cisco also predicts that in 2016, Wi-Fi accounted for 52% of Internet access, cellular accounted for 10%, and fixed lines accounted for 38%. In 2021, Wi-Fi will account for 53% of Internet access, cellular will account for 20%, and fixed lines will account for 27%. The traffic generated by Wi-Fi and mobile connected devices will account for 73% of Internet traffic.

At this time, using 5G outdoors and Wi-Fi 6 indoors is a better choice from the perspective of cost and experience. In addition, as the main driving force for the increase in Wi-Fi devices will shift from mobile phones to non-mobile terminal devices (AIoT, smart homes, industry, automobiles, etc.), Wi-Fi will become more important.

Wi-Fi can become more important because of the evolution of Wi-Fi technology. In the past, Wi-Fi technology standards were distinguished and represented by 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. When it evolved to 802.11 ax, in order to make it easier for everyone to distinguish, the Wi-Fi Alliance directly simplified the latest generation of Wi-Fi technology standards 802.11 ax to Wi-Fi 6, and renamed the previous two generations of technology 802.11n and 802.11ac to Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 respectively.

Wi-Fi 6 has changed the previous Wi-Fi standard upgrades that only focused on speed improvement and ignored the upgrade of network capacity. It has made corresponding improvements in speed, frequency band, and coverage area. To make a brief summary, Wi-Fi 6 mainly brings improvements in four aspects:

• The theoretical transmission rate and throughput of Wi-Fi 6 are 2.7 times that of Wi-Fi 5;

• The signal can cover an area as large as two football fields;

• With wake-up function, it can save energy by 7 times and save more power;

• Wi-Fi 6 can better connect more devices and increase the speed of each device by at least 4 times

Broadcom is the fastest mover in the Wi-Fi 6 chip market. In 2017, Broadcom launched the Max Wi-Fi chip based on the Wi-Fi 6 standard, with three models: civilian, commercial, and mobile platform integrated with Bluetooth.

Qualcomm and MediaTek entered the Wi-Fi market through acquisitions in 2011. With the accumulation of technology and market experience, the two mobile phone SoC giants have also demonstrated stronger competitiveness in the Wi-Fi market. Last year, Qualcomm, MediaTek, HiSilicon, and Unisoc all launched dual Wi-Fi connection solutions under the Wi-Fi 5 standard.

Dual Wi-Fi connection means that communication devices such as mobile phones and TVs can be connected to the Wi-Fi router via 5GHz and 2.4GHz at the same time. Such a connection can bring greater bandwidth through the 5GHz frequency band while reducing interference from 2.4GHz connections (such as microwave ovens), increasing speed while bringing higher stability.

While the competition for Wi-Fi 5 is escalating, the competition for Wi-Fi 6 also started in 2019. At MWC 2019, Qualcomm released the QCA6390 chip that supports both WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. This SoC uses a 14nm process and can reach a rate of 1.8Gbps when 1024-QAM dual-band and 8×8 MU-MIMO are enabled.

During Computex 2019, Leifeng.com also saw the Wi-Fi 6 chipset displayed by MediaTek, which also uses OFDMA and 1024QAM technology. It is suitable for smart connections between home and network services and supports products including wireless access points, routers, gateways and repeaters.

It is reported that MediaTek will mass-produce Wi-Fi 6 chips this year. Another player, Unisoc, will also launch Wi-Fi 6 chips this year.

As for Huawei, a heavyweight player, it launched the Kirin W650 mobile phone Wi-Fi 6 chip and the Lingxiao 650 series home network Wi-Fi 6 solution at the Huawei MateXs launch conference yesterday. Officials said that the Kirin W650 supports 160MHz bandwidth and a peak rate of up to 2.4Gbps.

The Lingxiao 650 series includes Lingxiao 650 Wi-Fi, Lingxiao 650 PLC (Power Line Communication) and Lingxiao 650, which are aimed at home scenarios.

It can be seen that among the four major 5G baseband chip providers, except for Unisoc, which has not yet officially released Wi-Fi 6 chips, the other companies have already released or started large-scale commercial use. The layout of Wi-Fi 6 also represents the competitiveness of these chip giants in the AIoT era.

Huawei's two latest Wi-Fi 6 chips have a feature. When the Kirin W650 is paired with the Lingxiao 650 Wi-Fi chip, Huawei's end-to-end advantages can be brought into play - Huawei's dynamic narrow bandwidth technology can dynamically adjust the bandwidth in Wi-Fi weak signal scenarios, making the connection more stable under the same Wi-Fi signal, and Wi-Fi performance can be improved by 6dB.

Huawei said that compared with other Wi-Fi 6 devices in the industry without dynamic narrow bandwidth, it can penetrate one more wall; it supports collaboration between HiEX mobile phones and routing terminals to improve dynamic anti-interference capabilities, and reduces Wi-Fi air interface latency by 50% in multiplayer games and education scenarios, greatly eliminating business interruptions and freezes in interference environments.

Obviously, 5G plus Wi-Fi can not only solve the problem of slow growth in the mobile phone market, but can also be better applied to AIoT scenario markets such as industry and automobiles, and tap the huge potential of emerging markets.

Qualcomm also expressed the idea of ​​integrating the two technologies last year. Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm and head of the chip division, said in an interview with Reuters last year: "In the future, we should be committed to developing an integrated platform that has both millimeter wave (5G technology) and Wi-Fi 6 technology. "

In other words, combining the two latest wireless communication technologies can make the two wireless communication technologies complement each other in indoor and outdoor scenarios, maximize the network transmission rate, improve stability, reduce latency, save costs, and better adapt to the needs of the trillion-dollar AIoT market. Of course, the four major chip giants, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Unisoc, and Huawei, will show stronger competitiveness in the future wireless communication applications and markets compared to companies that can only provide Wi-Fi 6 chips.

However, the advantages of these remaining participants vary, and the future competitive situation deserves more attention.