Juwei: Deeply cultivate every "wireless + sensor" application field required

Shanghai Juwei Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. was established in 2014. Since its inception, it has followed the trend of wireless Internet and invested in the upcoming development of the Internet of Things industry. It focuses on providing chips and related system designs for the industry, providing the most cost-effective general wireless chips and wireless sensor chips and solutions, and has become a major supplier of wireless sensor nodes.

"Using technology to change the world" is Juwei's ideal, and its "technology" gene has been deeply rooted in its soul since its establishment. Juwei was co-founded by China's top IC design experts and has a research and development team composed of many returnees with many years of successful industry experience and Tsinghua PhDs. Its core technical capabilities cover RF, analog, SOC and system software design. Today, Juwei has become a well-known company in the field of wireless connection chips for the Internet of Things in China.

The Internet of Things is coming, which has become a consensus in the industry. GSMA predicts that the number of global IoT connections will reach 10.8 billion in 2019, and this number will rise further to 25 billion in the next five years. It is expected that by 2022, the average household will have more than 50 IoT devices.

在此大潮下，巨微董事长兼总经理许刚认为，“物联网大潮下的无线市场具有显著的碎片化和不确定性。同时，我们看到整个市场的总体量在迅速增长，这给提供软硬件基础的芯片原厂带来了市场投入风险和方案工程效率低下的挑战。在物联网碎片化的情况下，芯片原厂更像一个方案服务公司。”

To solve the above problems, Juwei has created the "Xinhuo" architecture. The "Xinhuo" architecture adopts a software hardware strategy, which greatly hardwareizes the computing operations that require high-speed processing. The front-end chip contains RF and BLE digital baseband, which completes the reception/transmission and modulation/demodulation of BLE broadcast and data, as well as baseband data conversion. The BLE protocol stack runs on the MCU, reuses the powerful processing and control capabilities of the MCU, and improves the resource utilization of the MCU.

What is even more innovative is that the "Xinhuo" architecture saves an MCU dedicated to baseband and protocol stack processing in SOC and solution design, thereby saving system costs. At the same time, for different applications, corresponding application MCUs can be selected for combination. These advantages make the system design not only meet the requirements of PPA (Power, Performance & Area), but also greatly meet the "application" (A, Application). It can be said that the "Xinhuo" architecture proposed by Juwei optimizes PPAA (Power, Performance, Area & Application).

Based on the "Xinhuo" architecture, Juwei launched corresponding product series, including MG127 series, MG126 series and MG223 series. At the same time, Juwei launched a series of Bluetooth SOC products with integrated high-precision ADC for signal chain applications, including MS1596.

According to reports, MS1596 is a highly integrated SOC chip that integrates high-precision ADC, low-noise amplifier, and BLE transceiver chip. The integrated low-noise amplifier can provide 1~128 times of amplification capability; the ADC can achieve a conversion accuracy of up to 20 bits of ENOB. BLE transceiver can complete the complete data interaction function with mobile phones or Bluetooth routers. The chip integrates technologies ranging from low-noise amplification, high-precision sampling quantization to 2.4GHz RF transceiver and BLE baseband and protocol processing, and has the characteristics of high integration, low power consumption, and small package. It is worth mentioning that all the IPs here are completely independently developed by the Juwei Integrated Circuit team.

In general, Juwei not only innovated the "Xinhuo" architecture to empower manufacturers in the industry who need BLE; at the same time, Juwei completely independently designed the full-link Bluetooth IP from RF to baseband and protocol stack. This is much better than competitors in terms of cost and flexibility. At the same time, Juwei is also the first Bluetooth manufacturer to integrate a complete sensor signal conditioning circuit on BLESOC.

Looking to the future, according to Xu Gang, Juwei will launch a series of Bluetooth SOC chips with integrated signal chain processing for the Bluetooth 5.2 standard in one or two years. When asked about mass production, Xu Gang told Jiwei.com reporters: "This year, the Bluetooth SOC chip with pressure sensor signal conditioning circuit has been mass-produced. It is expected that about 20 million chips will be produced next year. The real large-scale outbreak period is expected to be in 2022, when the shipment volume may exceed 50 million."

Xu Gang believes that the IoT market is not only distributed in the low-end, fast-iterating consumer electronics market, but will also widely cover the high-profit, slow-iterating industrial, medical and automotive fields. Therefore, the total market volume will grow at an accelerated rate in the next 5 to 10 years.

In this process, "Juwei's 'Xinhuo' architecture will uphold the historical responsibility of empowering the IoT ecosystem and give wings to all chip manufacturers that lack wireless capabilities. At the same time, together with partners, we will delve deeply into every application field that requires 'wireless + sensing'." Xu Gang hopes so.