Boliu Liu Zhanling: The popularization of whole-house intelligence requires edge gateways

Recently, at the first Dishui Lake China RISC-V Industry Forum co-organized by China RISC-V Industry Alliance, VeriSilicon Microelectronics and Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Cluster Development Promotion Organization, Liu Zhanling, vice president of marketing at Boliu Intelligent, interpreted the pain points of today's smart home market in conjunction with the company's newly launched edge gateway solution.

Liu Zhanling, Vice President of Marketing at Boliu Intelligent

Liu Zhanling said that the smart home market will go through three evolutionary stages. The earliest "single product intelligence" only needs to solve the networking problem. When it comes to "whole house intelligence", it is necessary to solve the integration of multiple wireless technologies and human-computer interaction. For the future real smart home era, more in-depth involvement of AI is needed.

At present, the market is in the process of iterating from single-product intelligence to whole-house intelligence. During this process, Liu Zhanling also found three major obstacles: first, the underlying interconnection protocol has not been opened up, and second, human-computer interaction has not been widely adopted. For example, Liu Zhanling said that the activation rate of WiFi in smart air conditioners is less than 10%. The third is the deep integration with the scene.

How does BoLiu do it?

Liu Zhanling said that in order to solve the pain points of the smart home market, Boliu Intelligence has chosen three operating directions.

The first is to actively invest in the ecosystem, cooperate with partners in an open and open source manner, and actively contribute to open source communities including RISC-V.

Secondly, in terms of software development, Bolu Intelligence has developed an SDK platform that supports all types of chips of the company, which eliminates the need for engineers to switch between platforms.

Third, the underlying chip is important. As a wireless chip supplier that embraced RISC-V earlier, Bolu Intelligent has shipped thousands of Wi-Fi/Bluetooth two-in-one products using RISC-V so far. Liu Zhanling believes that this success is mainly because the fragmented needs of AIoT are very consistent with the open source characteristics of RISC-V.

BoLiu launches the first RISC-V AI edge processor

In addition to the RISC-V core, Bolu Intelligence also has many other technical features, such as a rich product line and support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and other protocols. At the same time, Bolu Intelligence has higher performance, and its Wi-Fi signal can penetrate one more wall than that of its competitors.

Liu Zhanling said that after the Wi-Fi/BLE dual-mode chip BL602 and BLE/Zigbee dual-mode chip BL702, which have been mass-produced by Bolu Intelligent, solved the networking problem, the company began to focus on edge-side processing chips to solve the unloading of the main router. Liu Zhanling said that when there are more than 30 connected devices at home, many products are prone to disconnection. This is mainly because routers are mainly optimized for high-throughput products such as mobile phones, tablets, and TVs, and it is difficult to take into account low-throughput IoT devices. For this reason, the concept of edge gateways came into being. Many IoT devices can be connected to the edge first, which can effectively solve the router overload on the one hand. It can also make the connection more stable.

The product BL606P released by Boliu this time is the first AI edge chip of Boliu Intelligence. Together with the previous dual-mode chip, it can form an AIoT chip platform for smart homes and provide customers with a one-stop solution. The main features of BL606P are: new connections and new interactions. New connections refer to the chip's integration of multi-mode wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi, BT dual-mode, Zigbee, and Thread. It is the industry's first single-antenna four-mode wireless protocol with high integration. New interactions refer to the chip's integration of multi-mode wireless protocols, as well as audio codecs, DSPs, and other AI voice processing-related hardware, as well as support for color screen display, which can realize microphone matrix far-field voice interaction. In addition, the BL606P chip adopts a dual RISC-V core architecture, plus the BL602 and BL702 chips based on the RISC-V core that have been mass-produced. Users can conveniently switch and combine IoT connections and AI edge product categories based on the same set of RISC-V development environments and tools.

The main application scenarios of the product include: smart panels, voice switches, smart speakers, voice control, Matter gateways, etc.