01 background
From 2018 to 2020, the home smart vision (consumer IPC) market has grown rapidly. According to iResearch, the market size of China's home smart vision products will reach 33.1 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 53.5% since 2016. After the explosive growth in 2016, the home camera market is now in a relatively mature stage. In 2020, China’s home camera shipments will reach 40.4 million units, and the compound growth rate in the next five years is expected to be 15.1%. Looking at the world, the global home camera shipments in 2020 will be 88.89 million units, about 2.2 times that of the Chinese market, and the compound growth rate is expected to be 19.3% in the next five years. Based on this calculation, the global home camera shipments will exceed 200 million in 2025 tower.
With the rapid growth of the home camera market and the maturity of technology, the technical threshold of traditional home cameras is gradually lowered, resulting in extremely fierce market competition, which has basically become a sea of red. In addition, since the end of 2020, the core shortage problem has intensified and the price of upstream raw materials has risen sharply, causing the profits of various production companies to drop sharply. Domestic factories and overseas brand owners are seeking new revenue and profit growth points.
Under such circumstances, original chip manufacturers and solution providers have laid out the low-power IP camera market. The biggest feature of low-power IPC products is ultra-low power consumption and battery power supply, which perfectly solves the problems of external power supply and network wiring. It solves the shackles of wires, especially for countries with high labor costs such as overseas, Europe and the United States, and easily solves the problem of high installation costs.
The following is a brief introduction to the mainstream chip manufacturers that do low-power solutions in the current market, and also provides a reference for colleagues who consider low-power solutions in the future.
02 Introduction of mainstream low-power chip manufacturers
-
Hisilicon Hi3518EV300
The Hi3518EV300 chip is widely used in the field of video surveillance. Most low-power solution providers use this chip as the main chip. In order to reduce power consumption and speed up device wake-up, HiSilicon adopts the Liteos system with faster startup speed and less resource consumption. , the details of HiSilicon’s low-power solution are relatively mature in the market, so I won’t go into details here. From the perspective of the market, HiSilicon occupies half of the entire security monitoring field. It is precisely because of its ultra-high market share that after HiSilicon was sanctioned in the second half of 2020, other chip manufacturers were unable to meet market demand, making the market The core shortage became more and more serious. At the same time, due to the difficulty of switching low-power solutions, there was also a gap period in the middle. At this stage, it is difficult to improve the supply of HiSilicon in the short term. It is not recommended to invest too much energy in development. Of course, if you can get technical and supply support from GK channels, you can switch in parallel based on the original HiSilicon solution. Because The GK low-power solution has not been released on a large scale, so those who have a basic understanding of the GK solution are all directional support. Of course, according to the current situation, the supply of GK is not very sufficient, and a large part of the chips may also be mainly used. On back-end products with relatively high profits.
-
Beijing Junzheng T31ZL/T21
Beijing Junzheng is a leading microprocessor designer. At the end of 2015, the video chip was successfully developed and the T-series main control chip was launched on the market. At the first time, based on the T21 chip, customers tried to make low-power products, and then gradually switched to the T31 chip, using 22nm Manufacturing process, Ingenic’s low-power controllers currently on the market are mainly equipped with MTK7682 or HiSilicon 3861L WiFi modules. Ingenic is one of the manufacturers other than HiSilicon that laid out the low-power market earlier. When HiSilicon was sanctioned, Ingenic became one of the few low-power chip solutions available in the market. The power consumption solution will also have more problems, and it has also been complained by many customers. With the increase of customers connecting with the Ingenic solution, the optimization and improvement speed of the original factory has also been accelerated. Ingenic's low-power consumption solution has now become the mainstream of the market. One of the schemes, the main willingness is that there are more customers using this scheme and the scheme is becoming more and more stable. The second is that the external development documents of the Ingenic scheme are relatively complete and the development difficulty is relatively low. For customers who want to choose the Ingenic solution at present, if they can solve the supply problem from the original factory and can accept the price of the Ingenic T31Zl in the current market, then the Ingenic solution is a better choice in the current low-power market.
-
Realtek RTL8715
Realtek launched chips for the low-power market as early as 2018. The biggest advantage of Realtek's low-power chips is that it integrates the main control and Wifi. Manufacturers with video encoding and decoding capabilities and network transmission experience. In addition, the chip uses a dedicated RTOS system, which greatly improves the startup speed and power consumption of the device. However, after more than two years of promotion, the realtek solution has not been widely used in the market. The reasons are as follows. First, the development of RTOS system is much more difficult than the development of conventional Linux system, and there are more parts that need to be updated by the original factory. At the same time, the supporting cloud platform also needs to invest more resources for adaptation. Second, the initial price of the product is higher than that of other competitors in the market. Third, some customers are concerned about the image effect. At the current stage, the solution has been perfected from the technical side after such a long period of accumulation. In addition, due to market shortages, the prices of competitors have generally risen. At present, the cost of Realtek’s solution has certain advantages. In terms of video effects, it has been optimized through algorithms, etc. It has also been improved to a certain extent. Another key factor is that Realtek has relatively few customers in the market and has certain advantages in supply. So on the whole, the Realtek 8715 solution is also a better choice.
-
Rockchip RK1109/RK1126
RK1109 and RK1126 are two heavy chips launched by Rockchip for visual applications. These two chips adopt pin 2 pin design, and customers can realize seamless switching. Compared with other manufacturers, Rockchip’s biggest advantage is the built-in NPU and It has its own algorithm and has a good performance in video image effects. Both chips use a higher-tech 14nm process, and the official power consumption is 201mW. Rockchip's low power consumption solution is basically directly supported by the original factory, and most of them are mainly brand customers with integrated production, research and sales. In addition, compared with other main control chips in the market, the price of Rockchip is slightly higher, and the price is on the biased side. High-end and functionally differentiated routes, so the low-power market is not as well-known as HiSilicon and Ingenic. I personally think that Rockchip’s low power consumption will have a certain market prospect in the future. In addition to the advantages of the above-mentioned solutions, it is more from a market perspective. On the one hand, the price of RK will be a cost down version in the future, which will compete with peers in terms of cost performance. If we can reach some strategic agreements with RK in the early stage, we will get more supply and business support. In the current situation of unstable supply, obtaining the support of the original factory is an important part of continuous operation.
In addition to the current mainstream low-power chip manufacturers mentioned above, there are also Fullhan, Sigmstar, Linktone, OV, and Quanzhi all have low-power solutions, but at present, the market share is relatively small. On the one hand, It is related to the product, and it is also closely related to the deployment time of the low-power market. Of course, these original manufacturers currently have their own typical customers, and they are gradually expanding the low-power market through these customers. The power consumption scheme is described in detail.
03 Summary of low power consumption market
Although the market capacity of low-power IPC products is far less than the market capacity of long-power IPC products, all upstream manufacturers are actively deploying, which is more optimistic about the future market, because it is backward compatible and can do a good job in low-power It must be able to do a good job of long-term power supply IPC, which is also an inevitable trend of technological development. The layout of the upstream original factory for low power consumption is also a huge benefit for the entire low-power IPC market. The more players there are, the more competition there will be in the market, the better the technology will be developed, and the products will have higher profits. Cost-effective, when it reaches a certain stage, it will gradually cut off the long-term power supply IPC market, and through the improvement of technology, consumers will upgrade their consumption in a subtle way.
For manufacturers, solution providers, and brand owners, it is also a good time to enter the low-power IPC market. Product profits are relatively high, there are certain technical thresholds, and upstream technologies and supporting facilities are constantly improving.
The above only represent personal opinions. If there are any mistakes, please point them out in time. I also hope to pay more attention to the "Security Industry Observation" official account.
