In IoT, smart life starts from smart home, and Wi-Fi is undoubtedly the first choice for network connection in home scenario. It is predicted that by 2020, Wi-Fi in the smart home market will create a value of about $121.7 billion. 

According to ijiwei, after more than two decades of development, the IoT industry is entering a period of rapid development. Wi-Fi, as the most widely used LAN connection communication protocol in the world, is one of the main connection methods for IoT. Predictably, the rapid development of IoT is also driving the rapid growth of Wi-Fi chip market. According to ABI Research data, the global WiFi chip market will be about 3.2 billion in 2019. With the rise of applications such as Wi-Fi Mesh network, smart home and connected car, WiFi chips maintain a rapid growth trend. 

Diversified products, a large user base provides an inherent advantage for Wi-Fi to enter the IoT market. In the IoT, smart life starts with smart home, and WiFi is undoubtedly the first choice for network connectivity in the home scenario. It is predicted that by 2020, Wi-Fi in the smart home market will create a value of about $121.7 billion. 

Smart home access threshold increases to create a high-quality ecosystem 

It is worth notice that due to the uneven and fierce competition in the Wi-Fi market, high-standard and high-quality Wi-Fi products have been in demand for many smart home vendors, and the establishment of authoritative Wi-Fi product testing and certification standards has become a key core point.

Recently, "2020 Shanghai International Smart Home Exhibition" was successfully held, and at the forum "Wi-Fi 6 and Smart Home Industry Application" hosted by WiFi Alliance, Mr. Huang Jiarui, Asia-Pacific Representative Office and Greater China Director of Wi-Fi Alliance, hosted the forum and gave a speech titled "WiFi Smart Living".

In his speech, Mr. Peng Zhen, Director of the International Certification Department of the National Radio Monitoring Center, focused on the importance of product testing and certification. He pointed out that the products need to meet the requirements of government mandatory certification and industry voluntary alliance certification, generally CCC, SRRC, CE and FCC, etc., and the chips need to perform well in the key technical indicators such as basic communication performance, interconnection performance, compatibility performance and security performance. During the forum, Mr. Lu Ye, Minister of Certification Center of China Household Electric Appliance Research Institute (CHEARI), elaborated on the important planning and layout of CHEARI as a national authoritative research institution to establish an integrated certification system of "standard, testing and certification".

The National Radio Monitoring Center Testing Center and the China Household Electric Appliance Research Institute also announced that they will launch a new national level certification standard, the Smart Home WiFi Performance Index Certification, to standardize the requirements and criteria for evaluating the functions of Wi-Fi in smart homes. In the future, it may be used as a smart home access condition, thus guiding and promoting the benign development of the smart home industry.

Dr. Chen Ting, Smart Connection Expert of IoT Division, Midea Group 

As one of the important enterprises in the smart home industry chain, Midea is very supportive of the launch of Smart Home Wi-Fi Performance Index Certification. In his speech, Dr. Chen Ting, Smart Connectivity Expert of IoT Division of Midea Group, pointed out that in the process of working with upstream chip manufacturers to improve user experience, Midea deeply felt the impact of the lack of unified standards and authoritative certification for the IoT industry on users' connection experience. I hope that the standards and authoritative certification for the IoT industry will be established as soon as possible, and I believe this will greatly regulate and promote the application and promotion of Wi-Fi6 technology in smart home. 

In addition to the recognition of terminal companies, chip manufacturers are also very much looking forward to the early implementation and promotion of the Smart Home Wi-Fi Performance Index certification. Dr. Jiang Peichen, R&D Director of IoT Division of ASR, was also invited to deliver a keynote speech. He told ijiwei that the Smart Home Wi-Fi Performance Index Certification has three main advantages: First, it is a perfect test item and test scenario, which solves the practical testing problems of chip manufacturers; second, it is a unified high standard, which can improve the technical access of Wi-Fi chips in the home industry; third, it is a consumer/client certification. The third is that consumers/clients see consistent product performance, which is conducive to the development and growth of the entire market.

Demand for High-Quality Wi-Fi Chips Soaring 

Data from Gartner show that the global IoT device volume will reach 20.4 billion units by 2020, with a CAGR of 34% from 2016-2020. The amount of China's IoT devices is expected to reach 8.9 billion units, with an estimated CAGR of 36% from 2016-2020, and the volume of IoT devices will drive a significant increase in demand for Wi-Fi chips.

It is expected that by 2020, the global Wi-Fi MCU communication chip market will reach 118.3 billion yuan, which is a huge market. At the same time, as the potential of smart sockets, smart lights, smart door locks and other smart home products in the domestic market has not been excavated, the future market of Wi-Fi chips is quite promising.

In this context, Midea, as the "leader" in white goods, had began to layout early for introducing Wi-Fi technology into smart home devices. According to ijiwei, Midea and ASR jointly developed a smart home Wi-Fi |Combo chip, making high-performance low-cost intelligent home appliances possible. It means that in the future a smart home appliance can be turned into a smart networking device at a relatively low cost, greatly reducing the cost of consumers for smart home appliances. At present, it has been fully implemented to the whole category of smart home appliances, and the two parties will also unfold cooperation in more aspects in the future. Meanwhile, in the fields of small home appliances and electrical products, ASR has also achieved bulk shipments to Ali Feiyan, Tmall Genie, Jingdong Cloud, Baidu Cloud and other cloud platforms. 

While communicating and cooperating deeply with major white goods manufacturers, ASR has been focusing on and working to improve the users’ IoT WiFi experience of white goods customers. ASR has developed a Wi-Fi+BLE Combo chip based on the previous IoT Wi-Fi chip and is now ready to provide prototypes, which will further enhance the user experience in terms of network distribution and mesh networking. It will provide more diverse application possibilities. 

As the smart home market continues to grow, Wi-Fi 6 technology, which enables more devices to be connected and provides a higher network speed, has come to the forefront and received wide attention from the industry since the official launch of the Wi-Fi 6 certification program. Currently, the entire Wi-Fi industry chain, including chips, modules, wireless communication devices, wireless routers, smart terminals, etc., has been improving gradually. 

According to the person in charge of ASR, ASR's next-generation IoT Wi-Fi chip will fully refer to the excellent features of WiFi6. In the future, ASR will continue to work with leading white goods manufacturers to meet market demands through optimization and innovation."

There is no doubt that the continuous evolution of Wi-Fi technology will definitely accelerate the development of smart home. The huge smart home market needs to be developed by all the upstream and downstream manufacturers in the entire industry chain. Continuous technological innovation and joint efforts are necessary to promote the improvement of relevant standards, testing, certification and other systems. We believe that the layout and efforts of ASR and other domestic chip manufacturers in the industry chain, especially the chip field, will promote the popularizing of Wi-Fi technology in the smart home market.