Publish Time：2021-04-19
In recent years, the penetration rate of smart home applications has grown rapidly. Battery-powered smart home terminals, including battery-powered cameras, smart doorbells and smart locks, have gained great popularity among consumers thanks to their outstanding merits in easy installation, practicality and safety, with shipment volumes increasing year after year. Nevertheless, challenges remain in installation cost optimization and battery life improvement for such devices. In particular, the power consumption of Wi-Fi chips directly determines battery life, creating strong market demand for a low-power Wi-Fi chip that maintains persistent Wi-Fi connectivity, supports fast remote wake-up and enables high-definition video transmitting.
AltoBeam, a leading domestic supplier of Wi-Fi transceiver chips, has newly launched ATBM6441, an ultra-low-power Wi-Fi chip specially developed for battery-powered smart home devices. Its core application feature is maintaining Wi-Fi connectivity with the cloud while the entire device is in sleep mode, enabling fast remote wake-up. After being woken up, it supports stable high-throughput data transmission such as high-definition video streaming.
ATBM6441 integrates an ultra-low-power MCU and on-chip Flash memory, with embedded IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN and TCP/IP protocol stacks. Benefiting from low-power circuit design and advanced ultra-low-power manufacturing process, its sleep power consumption is drastically reduced versus previous generations. Equipped with abundant peripheral interfaces including GPIO, UART, I2C, SDIO, SPI, PWM, I2S and ADC input, ATBM6441 can replace standalone low-power MCUs widely used in existing terminal products, substantially cutting total BOM and design costs of customer solutions.
Since the second half of 2020, AltoBeam has partnered with multiple leading SoC vendors for video surveillance. Leveraging engineering samples of ATBM6441, the company has rolled out reference design solutions for a wide range of smart terminal products to help downstream customers accelerate new product development. ATBM6441 has now entered mass production and is ready for volume shipment. Initial batches of ATBM6441 chips will be deployed in battery-powered security cameras from a well-known US brand and launch in European and American markets soon.
With outstanding RF performance and robust anti-interference capability, AltoBeam's Wi-Fi chips have gained widespread recognition in niche markets demanding consistent throughput. AltoBeam has grown into the largest supplier of single-antenna Wi-Fi 4 chips for TV sets, wireless cameras, office equipment and other terminal applications.
As the most fundamental Wi-Fi transmission standard, 2.4 GHz single-band single-antenna Wi-Fi 4 boasts massive global deployment. Starting from late 2020, the semiconductor industry suffered from an unprecedented global chip shortage, with single-band single-antenna Wi-Fi 4 chips facing particularly acute supply constraints. Working closely with upstream supply chain partners with nearly a decade of cooperation history, AltoBeam has secured steady supply across its full lineup of Wi-Fi chips and other IC products.