Smart watch technology and market development
The emergence of smart phones has completely subverted the daily life of the public, and has also spawned a number of new types of smart devices. Among the various products interconnected with mobile phones, smart watches have already become a key part and gradually integrated into people's intelligent life. The seemingly sudden rise of smart watches has actually gone through decades of development, and its functions are becoming more and more abundant, and it is more and more closely connected with the lives of the public.
According to a survey by Canalys Counterpoint, the global smartwatch shipments are in a spiraling upward trend from 2016 to 2021. Among them, under the condition that the epidemic situation is gradually brought under control, productivity has also recovered, and shipments in 2021 will increase significantly, surpassing 100 million shipments for the first time, an increase of 28.31% compared with 2020. Looking back at the data of domestic smartwatches, the overall trend is basically consistent with the global smartwatch shipments from 2016 to 2022, reaching a peak in 2021, close to 40 million shipments.
Speaking of the functions of the smartwatch itself. Presumably in most people's cognition, the watch is mostly linked to sports, in addition to NFC or related notification functions. Looking at the entire watch market, sports watches are indeed one of the major categories. It mainly monitors heart rate, blood oxygen, duration, exercise status, etc. during exercise, provides guidance from professional databases for users to exercise, and records data such as exercise trajectory and exercise mileage, and generates corresponding exercise reports for users to understand. own movement. In addition, many more professional sports watches have been derived, which can provide various sports monitoring for professional athletes, and have the characteristics of waterproof, sweatproof, dustproof and so on. From this point of view, sports watches have certain uses for both ordinary users and professional users.
In recent years, smart watches have appeared sleep detection, sedentary reminder, drinking water reminder, blood pressure monitoring and other functions, which are basically related to human life and health. Looking at the entire industry, it is not difficult to find that smart watches are gradually developing towards "health", which is called "health smart watches" for the time being. It not only conforms to the established development trajectory of sports watches, but also derives new "healthy" functions. In today's environment, it is undoubtedly a very popular product for users.
After years of continuous development, smart watches have become a very complete wearable device. Compared with traditional quartz watches/mechanical watches, smart watches can not only display the time, but also shoulder the function of human health monitoring. At the same time, it is also an extension of the mobile phone screen, which can display message notifications, make mobile payments, and link with smart homes. There is also a complete mobile phone function, which can be used independently from the mobile phone.
Smartwatches can be divided into four categories according to the target group: children's smartwatches, adult smartwatches, sports smartwatches, and elderly smartwatches; according to whether they can connect to the Internet and make calls independently, they can be divided into Bluetooth version, Bluetooth WiFi version and cellular data version.
The "smart" aspect of a smartwatch is that it has an independent embedded operating system, a data processing center, which needs to call the information collected by various sensors, as well as a screen, memory, battery, power management system, Radio frequency systems, etc., are similar to smartphones in terms of internal chip materials and structural design.
TWS true wireless earphones and smart watches are two important products currently driving the development of the wearable device market. Smartwatches with different positioning and prices vary widely in function and system complexity. The ideal situation is that a main control chip is fully integrated, which can not only be responsible for system operation, but also support display and touch, audio and video decoding, and integrates battery and power management systems as well as memory and storage. Power consumption Bluetooth, WiFi, positioning and other radio frequency functions, but such chips are highly integrated, difficult to process, and relatively expensive.
At present, many smart watch products on the market use multi-chip solutions, such as the combination of Bluetooth audio SoC + MCU + screen driver IC + power management IC + RF IC, which is bound to cause considerable challenges for circuit design and internal structure optimization.
The technical difficulty of smart watches is higher than that of smart wearable products such as smart bracelets and TWS earphones. important decision.
HiSilicon is a leading fabless semiconductor and device design company. Formerly known as Huawei Integrated Circuit Design Center, it started integrated circuit design and R&D business, and provided HiSilicon chip sales and services. Committed to providing customers in thousands of industries with pan-intelligent terminal chip solutions such as smart home, smart city and smart travel. HiSilicon products cover many fields such as smart vision, smart IoT, smart media, smart transportation and automotive electronics, displays, mobile terminals, data centers and optical transceivers.
MediaTek is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that designs system chips for wireless communications and high-definition TVs. The company has become the world's largest semiconductor company with its Dimensity series chips. MediaTek's core business includes mobile communications, smart home and automotive electronics, focusing on research and development of core chipset technologies for cross-platform.
Nordic Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company. The company specializes in ultra-low-power performance wireless systems-on-chips (SoCs) and connected devices for the 2.4 GHz ISM band, where power consumption and cost are the main focus areas. Typical end applications include consumer electronics, wireless mobile phone accessories, wireless gamepads, mice and keyboards, smart sports equipment, wireless medical, remote control, etc.
Realtek Semiconductor is an internationally renowned IC professional design company. Realtek takes the R&D and design of integrated circuit products as its corporate positioning. From product R&D, design, testing to sales, it adheres to the principle of seeking innovation and change to achieve "new technologies, new products, new applications, new values and new markets". The goal. Realtek has successfully developed application integrated circuits in various fields, and its product line spans technologies such as communication networks, computer peripherals, and multimedia.