Bluetooth 5.1 chip is being developed.

It is learnt that Lianrui Microelectronics, a developer of low-power Bluetooth chips, recently announced the completion of the A + round of tens of millions of yuan. Investment, funds will be mainly used to develop next-generation products, marketing and team building.

BlueX Microelectronics was established in June 2015, focusing on the research and development of ultra-low-power, low-cost Bluetooth core chip technology and its application in wearables, Internet of Things and other fields. The company’s headquarters is located in Hefei , And has R & D and technical service centers in Shenzhen, Hsinchu and Shanghai.

In the past 5 years, Lianrui Micro has developed four chips for Xiaomi bracelets and wearable devices: Bluetooth low energy SOC chip BX2400, ultra low power watchdog chip BX300, ultra low power RTC clock Wearable chipset of switch chip BX200 and ultra-low-power lithium battery protection chip BX100. In addition, the company is developing a chip product based on Bluetooth 5.1 design. It is planned to launch in the first half of 2020. The chip will increase the positioning function and increase the computing power by 3.5 times. The effective transmission distance can reach 1 km.

“The design of the Bluetooth chip requires the integration of high-frequency / RF Bluetooth modules with ARM cores and a large number of IOs. It also requires an easy-to-developed software architecture. The design difficulty is not as simple as the outside world thinks.” Li Ruiyu, the founder of Lianruiwei, told him that “the function, power consumption, and stability (robustness) of the Bluetooth chip are all important indicators to consider the performance of the product. In these aspects, Lianweiwei can be similar to foreign countries The products are comparable and can be imported substitutes. “

At present, according to the main market share of the low-power Bluetooth market, Europe and the United States are the main ones, such as Nordic, Dialog, TI, ST, Cypress, Silicon lab, and so on. Only a few domestic manufacturers can launch products that compete with it.

In terms of core competitiveness, Li Hongyu believes that the advantages of Lianrui Microelectronics are mainly reflected in:

· The company owns a full set of independent IP in radio frequency, and adopts unique design solutions to reduce the cost of the chip. In addition, the domestic supply chain cost is relatively low, and it has a cost advantage compared with similar advanced products abroad.

· On the basis of low energy consumption, chip products can also provide comparable foreign advanced products with strong computing power and larger system memory, and the chip area can be smaller.

Among them, the latest product BX2400 is a single-chip solution proposed by Lianweiwei for the Bluetooth low energy protocol. It integrates a 2.4G Bluetooth low energy radio frequency transceiver, application processor, memory, encryption engine, touch and lithium battery. The charging circuit conforms to the Bluetooth 5.0 technology standard, and has a rich peripheral interface that can be applied to a variety of IoT devices.

In terms of power consumption, the BX2400 usesSEMI’s CMOS 40nm ULP (ultra-low power consumption) process can achieve ultra-low power consumption of 4.2mA. In terms of reliability, the chip can work normally between -40 degrees Celsius and 125 degrees Celsius, and uses car-grade flash memory units. “In order to ensure the reliability of the chip, we will also conduct strict RF frequency deviation testing, using a Bluetooth organization It also tests the chip with strict standards. In addition, before the chip is mass-produced, we will contact the user to perform multiple tests such as pass-through to ensure stability. “Li Hongyu said.

In terms of product applications, Lianrui Microelectronics’ low-power Bluetooth chip has successfully entered the Xiaomi bracelet in 2019, and its products can also meet the fields of smart water meters, electricity meters, fingerprint locks, smart hardware, LED MESH lights, etc. Applications.

In recent years, wearable devices, smart homes, and low-power Internet of Things have been developing rapidly, and Bluetooth has also been rapidly developing as an indispensable part of such devices. Among them, low power consumption, long battery life, and highly stable Bluetooth have become necessary choices for the replacement of such devices.

According to Bluetooth SIG data, Bluetooth device shipments are expected to reach 4 billion in 2019, and 2018-2023 is expected The compound annual growth rate is about 8%. Global shipments of Bluetooth devices will be about 4 billion units in 2019, and by 2023 this number will grow to 5.4 billion units, with a compound growth rate of about 8%. In 2023, 90% of Bluetooth devices will use Bluetooth low energy < / a>, The market is expected to reach $ 6.7 billion .

At the application market level, The future development space of Bluetooth low energy is concentrated in smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, smart industries and other fields. SIG predicts that Bluetooth devices in these fields will reach a compound growth rate of more than 40% each year by 2023. Among them, The overall annual compound shipment growth rate will reach 59%, of which the annual shipments of all Bluetooth-related residential lighting equipment will reach 4.5 times in 2018 by 2023.

Li Hongyu revealed that the application of low-power Bluetooth radio frequency chips for residential lighting equipment is also the direction that Lianrui Microelectronics is developing.

In terms of team, Li Hongyu, the founder of Lianrui Microelectronics, graduated from the Department of Modern Physics of the University of Science and Technology of China. He has more than 20 years of chip development and entrepreneurial experience in Silicon Valley, Taiwan and mainland China. He has successively worked in Sun Microsystems, Philips, and MediaTek. Wait