" The largest market segment for GNSS chips has traditionally been the cell phone market, which has gradually moved into emerging markets such as wearables and IoT. On the other hand, with the development of V2X, ADAS and autonomous driving, high-precision GNSS enters everyone's view and becomes a design trend. This paper combs through the vein of GNSS chip development from both the mass market and professional market, summarizes the differences in the focus of several representative application scenarios on GNSS products, and finally expresses some of its own views on high-precision GNSS chips."
01 GNSS chip development lineage
First of all, define the categories of mass market and professional market in this paper. Mass market refers to: mass markets, large-scale, billion, billion scale, and directly related to consumers, the market segments are represented by smartphones, wearable devices and automobiles. Specialized markets refer to: specialized/ professional markets, not used in everyone's daily life, the segments are countless and much smaller, such as people, vehicles, asset tracking, anti-theft devices, vehicle telematics, mapping and monitoring, industrial robots, automated lawnmowers, heavy trucks, drones, and so on.
Mass market (mass markets)
Major shippers of GNSS ICs include Broadcom, Qualcomm, u-blox, MTK, ST, etc. (UW was mentioned in the Q4 2016 ABI research report). Their share of the mass market is directly correlated to their shipments, with Broadcom, Qualcomm, and MTK dominating the smartphone market (85% of GNSS IC shipments in 2018 were in the smartphone market), and going to the next volume tier segment when necessary, such as smartwatches.
ST is dominated by the automotive market, and u-blox segments are very mixed and eclectic.
Mass market from single-frequency ordinary precision to dual-frequency high-precision development trend is clear, ABI Research's market data report shows that in the next few years, dual-frequency devices will dominate the high-end smartphone market, and by 2023, shipments will exceed 1 billion, dual-frequency GNSS IC will account for 36% of the total global GNSS-LBS-IC shipments. The representative product of the dual-frequency chip is Broadcom BCM4775, and the Xiaomi 8 cell phone equipped with this chip is the world's first dual-frequency GNSS cell phone, and so far, BCM4775 has been equipped with all kinds of flagship smartphones, smartwatches, sports equipment and other terminal products. Earlier this year, Broadcom launched a new generation of dual-band products BCM4776, which further supports Beidou3's new signal B2a in the L5 band, increasing the number of available signals. Other manufacturers in the smartphone field have also proposed dual-frequency solutions, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon X24 and Huawei Haisi's Kirin 980.(ps: the world's first cell phone equipped with a domestically produced dual-frequency positioning chip and supporting the Beidou 3 system is the Lenovo Z6 Youth Edition, with the Huawei Beidou HD8040)
The use of dual-frequency GNSS L5 signals can mitigate multipath interference effects relative to single-frequency, especially in densely built-up areas such as urban canyons, where accuracy is significantly higher than single-frequency devices. However, it should be seen that there are still many factors to the full adoption of GNSS dual-band chips for smartphones has brought some obstacles, the main band (L1) outside the second band (L2 or L5) satellite coverage is insufficient (now in the process of improvement), the antenna size of the problem, and most importantly, or demand and PPA (performance-price-area) of the trade-offs. With the words of a friend working for Broadcom for many years, the customer for the accuracy from tens of meters to the meter level, both eyes light, what all good, and from the meter level to sub-meter, the inner no ripples, but on the power consumption and the price of the catty. As for smart phones and consumer devices such LBS applications to achieve mapping level accuracy, there are still many technical issues to be resolved in the next few years.
Another force for high-precision GNSS in the mass market comes from the field of autonomous driving. Advanced or fully unmanned driving requires lane-level positioning, and GNSS is an important component of the perception layer, with other sensors including LIDAR, cameras, and inertial devices. A new generation of GNSS hardware and new augmented positioning services are preparing for this future market.
The new hardware is reflected in more constellations and signals that further enhance the number and quality of GNSS observations, and the new augmented positioning services refer to precision single-point positioning (PPP) technology and the construction of corresponding satellite system signals. In traditional autopilot GNSS devices that rely on RTK techniques to obtain highly accurate positioning, the service provider sends each receiver its own, location-specific GNSS correction data (OSR difference in the observation domain) over the mobile network.
This is not a problem in the experimental phase, but when commercialized on a large scale, there are two main issues: 1. How many service providers are there if the differential service is just a fee? How to realize the charge? How to do across provinces? How to go abroad? How to sign a contract law? (This may not be a problem, the industrial chain division of labor and business model is determined, the problem will naturally be solved.) 2, RTK requires two-way connection between the user's equipment and corrective data services, the future of large-scale applications, single-user 2 ~ 5kbps uninterrupted connectivity on the communication network pressure is mainly reflected in the multi-connectivity, low latency. Network blocking, poor wireless signal quality caused by differential data delay or missing seriously affect the RTK positioning effect (5G network has been such a low rate, multi-connection, low latency as its typical scenario to be considered, but 5G terminals and users on the amount of RTK practical application effect to be verified). The principle of the new GNSS correction service, PPP, is to build real-time models of orbits, star clocks, and atmospheres over the entire region and broadcast this information via satellite and/or the Internet (state-domain SSR differential), which opens the door to large-scale mass-market applications of high-precision GNSS. The CLAS service provided by the Japanese QZSS system on the L6 frequency point is the first of its kind, and similar services are being done by the Galileo E6 and Beisan B2 frequency point PPP-B2b services. Currently can support L6 GNSS chip products are still relatively small, the future will have more manufacturers to support the development of simple PPP correction number Decoder chip combined with the existing GNSS chip rapid integration to provide products is also a method. However, PPP also has its own problems that need to be solved, convergence speed problems, etc., is the current academic research hotspot.
Specialized/Professional Markets (SPECIALIZED/PROFESSIONAL MARKETS)
Specialized markets are characterized by:
1, the segmentation of the market is relatively decentralized, ordinary precision segments include: personnel, vehicle and asset tracking, emergency call systems, vehicle telematics for insurance, anti-theft devices, etc.; high-precision segments include: precision agriculture, machinery control, robot navigation, mapping and monitoring, automated logistics trucks, automated lawnmowers and so on.
2, ordinary precision applications, high-precision applications are available, so before, and now, rather than like the mass market has a clear trend of ordinary precision to high-precision development. However, the chip-based high-precision market is the trend, and more and more high-precision board providers are starting to develop chip-based solutions.
02 High-precision GNSS chip random thoughts
1, high-precision era of different genes manufacturer's route: all the current manufacturers in the navigation chip in the development and launch of their own high-precision GNSS chip, which contains the previous manufacturers to do a single-frequency general precision products, but also contains the manufacturers of traditional high-precision application-oriented. These two types of manufacturers have their own technical evolution route, advantages and disadvantages.
Previously focused on ordinary precision products manufacturers, the advantage lies in the chip design capabilities (how to obtain the optimal solution of the PPA, performance-power-area, with the spirit of craftsmanship to key a relatively simple simple thing, to achieve the ultimate). Even if there is a difference in baseband signal processing capability, it does not hurt, and in terms of localization solving, for standard single-point positioning (SPP), Kalman filtering is sufficient, even if there is a difference, it does not hurt. Positioning speed, positioning accuracy, availability, size, power consumption and other acceptable performance, who's cheaper to use who's (posting money to sell is not in the scope of the discussion). The difficulty for these manufacturers to move towards high accuracy lies in the application of RTK, PPP and other carrier-based phase solving technologies, one is the improvement of the algorithm itself, and the other is how to push the performance to the extreme under the condition of limited frequency resources and storage resources. Explain, the difficulty does not lie in the baseband processing and chip design reasons: that does not lie in the chip design is well understood, general precision products chip has a long history; that does not lie in the baseband processing is because, although before these manufacturers only focus on the L1 band signals, into the era of high-precision, you need to focus on the many new signals in the frequency band of the L2, L5, L6 and so on, but in fact, this is a lot of new signals system does not have much of an essential But in fact, there is not much essential difference between these many new signal systems, there is a basis for dealing with L1 band signals, to deal with other frequency bands as natural as eating and drinking water. Now ordinary precision manufacturers have followed u-blox, from single-frequency chips to high-precision chips (dual-frequency-based, triple-frequency waste) to u-blox price as a benchmark, if you can provide comparable performance and power consumption, the price is half, or not worry about selling.
Previously focused on high-precision products manufacturers, the strength lies in the amount of multi-frequency band observations, the use of RTK algorithms, anti-jamming capabilities and other aspects of the accumulation of technology. In the past, high-precision products are mainly board cards, the fundamental reason is that the market capacity of high-precision applications is still small. High-precision products can easily be hundreds of channels, complex RTK solving, dozens of hundreds of Hz update rate, if the chip to realize, means more expensive processor IP, more storage, larger die size, that is, higher R & D and manufacturing costs. In the case of insufficient shipments, FPGA as the main product form factor is a natural choice. Now with the overall trend of miniaturization and low power consumption, as well as the development of new application markets such as self-driving cars, such traditional high-precision manufacturers have also begun to launch chip products. A relatively new one is the mosaic x5 module from Septentrio of Belgium. This type of product chip is characterized by the whole system full-frequency point full signal system at the same time support, easily 500, or even thousands of channels. For the future of these products need to focus on tracking and observation of its typical application scenarios, shipments and prices.
2, GNSS chip market competition is fierce, on the one hand, to improve performance, on the other hand, to reduce costs. Do not rely on a variety of add-ons, can rely on hard power in the mass market GNSS IC field to occupy a place in the manufacturers, are worthy of respect, because represents a kind of technical craftsman's spirit (PPA's harshness), which in the field of smart phones and wearable devices have been fully proved. Look at the smartphone full dual-band era and high-level autonomous driving era comes, who can achieve the largest market.
3, GNSS IC, I am a fan of Broadcom, Sony and MTK. Low profile, cutting edge (look at their articles on ISSCC), and no ambiguity about their products. It is also a fan of u-blox, countless customers require modules compatible with their pins, require them to standardize performance, require cheaper than them, see their influence in various market segments. ps: I found that the more I write the more casual, the beginning of the essay is to write the posture, the more the more talkative, talk to themselves, anytime you can go off the deep end, the nature of the east a hammer and the west a mallet as the shadow follows.
Ltd. specializes in high-precision GNSS modules and wireless communication products, technology development and application promotion service providers, relying on the wireless communication technology in the field of R & D and promotion of experience, JUNODA set up a team with a wealth of experience in hardware and software development technology, aimed at domestic and foreign OEM / ODM customers and system integrators to provide high-quality, high-performance wireless modules and applications! We aim to provide high-quality, high-performance wireless modules and application programs to OEM/ODM customers and system integrators at home and abroad, and create long-term value for customers!
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