Recently, the research work of "2023 China Indoor High Precision Positioning Technology Industry White Paper" is being launched.

The author first communicated with several domestic UWB chip enterprises, and through exchanges with several enterprise friends, the core viewpoint is that the certainty of the UWB outbreak is further strengthened.

UWB technology adopted by the iPhone in 2019 has become a "wind mouth", when a variety of overwhelming reports that the UWB technology will immediately explode, the market is also a variety of popularity "UWB this technology has what is awesome! "UWB technology can be used in which scenes? Resolve what needs?" And so on.

Although after Apple, the industry has some big enterprises in the layout, such as Millet releasing "a finger even", OPPO has also demonstrated the UWB mobile phone shell, Samsung launched a UWB mobile phone, and so on.

However, the industry is looking forward to the full outbreak of UWB - to become the standard for Android mobile phones, but this thing has not seen substantial progress.

In recent exchanges with several enterprise friends, we all feel that the time node of the UWB large-scale outbreak is even closer.

Why?

We can categorize the UWB positioning market can be grouped into 4 main categories:

The first type of market: Is ioT industry applications. Including chemical plants, power plants, coal mines, public prosecutors, law enforcement, warehousing and logistics, and so on.

The second type of market: is IoT consumer applications. Including a variety of smart hardware with UWB chips, such as TV remote controls, pet collars, object-seeking Tags, intelligent robots, and so on.

The third type of market: is the automotive market. Typical products are enterprise keys, car locks, etc.

The fourth type of market: is the mobile phone market. It is the mobile phone inside the UWB chip.

We usually say that the large-scale outbreak of UWB technology marks the outbreak of the fourth category of the mobile phone market.

And the logic of the outbreak for:

1 The mobile phone market, mainly the Android mobile phone market, if everyone uses UWB chips, then UWB will explode on a large scale.

2 The automotive market, if all large-scale use of UWB chips, will stimulate mobile phone manufacturers to accelerate the use of UWB chips, because the current automotive ecosystem and mobile phone ecosystem is converging, and the volume of the car is also large.

The changes brought to other markets after mobile phones started using UWB chips:

1 At present, UWB has developed quite well in IoT industry applications, with new applications appearing every year, but the use of industry application chips can not be compared with several other markets, but the industry market is a market belonging to solution providers and integrators, which will bring greater value to solution providers and integrators.

After the mobile phones have UWB chips, the mobile phones can be used as tags or even base station signal sources, which will give more choices for the program design of industry applications, and will also reduce the cost of users and promote the development of IoT industry applications.

2 IoT consumer applications are very dependent on mobile phones, based on the mobile phone as a platform device, UWB smart hardware product form may not be limited to object-oriented products, but also can be used as a connection product. This market volume is also very large.

At the present stage, the first step is to discuss whether UWB will be up in Android mobile phones, therefore, we focus on the analysis of the automotive market applications and the latest market of the mobile phone market.

From the current market information, the automotive market, is a very high certainty market, the current market, there are some car companies that have released the UWB car key-based models, and a very large number of car companies have already planned the UWB car key program into the next one or two years inside the new car.

It is expected that by 2025, we will see that even if Android mobile phones are not equipped with UWB chips, the market UWB car key will basically become the industry standard.

Compared with other Bluetooth digital car keys, UWB has two obvious advantages: high positioning accuracy and anti-relay attack.

The mobile phone market is to be divided into the Android ecosystem and the Apple ecosystem.

At present, Apple ecology has taken the UWB chip as a standard, and all Apple mobile phones from 2019 onwards have UWB chips, Apple has also extended the application of the UWB chip to the Apple watch, Airtag, and other ecological products.

iPhone last year's global shipments of about 230 million; Apple watch last year's shipments of more than 50 million; Airtag market shipments are expected to be in the 20-30 million, only the Apple ecology, the annual shipments of UWB devices more than 300 million.

But, after all, this is a closed ecosystem, and other UWB products can not be done in, therefore, the market is more concerned about the Android ecosystem, especially the domestic "Huamei OV" and other head manufacturers of the layout.

From the public news, millet released last year, Mix4 joined the UWB chip, but the news did not stir up too many waves in the industry, more is seen as a test of water.

Why are domestic Android mobile phone manufacturers slow to land on the UWB chip? On the one hand, because a separate UWB chip needs to add a few dollars to the chip cost, on the other hand, to be so highly integrated mobile phone motherboard inside another chip, the overall impact on the mobile phone is also very large.

What is the best solution for adding a UWB chip to a mobile phone? The answer may be Qualcomm, Huawei, MTK, and other mobile phone main chip manufacturers to add UWB function in their SoC.

From the information we have obtained so far, Qualcomm is doing this and is expected to release its 5G chip inside the UWB function as soon as next year, so that the UWB Android mobile phone market will naturally explode.