Yole and its partner System Plus Consulting have been studying the radar industry and are now providing an in-depth understanding of the market evolution and technical disruption through a wide collection of RF electronics reports. Both companies worked together to point out the evolution of radar technology for industrial and automotive applications in a relevant article published: Radar sensing, serving more use cases than you think.
“Consumer is the newest market segment in the radar industry,” according to Cédric Malaquin, Technology & Market Analyst, RF electronics at Yole Développement. Market opportunities in this segment are huge. They will be driven by consumer adoption of in-air motion sensing devices. So far, a single end system player, Google, is pushing radar-based in-air motion sensing. Google is expecting to face competition from Apple and Amazon in the near future.
According to Yole the consumer radar market will grow to US $250 million by 2025, at a +56% CAGR between 2019 and 2025. Yole’s analysts do not expect significant shipments for drones and few for presence detection. For the motion sensing case, however, they anticipate adoption through the home assistant market.
Therefore, in-air gesture sensing is a key technology for consumer devices, especially in the smart home era. However, fierce competition exists in this market, where we can see other sensing principles, mostly camera based, as well as other interaction methods, for instance voice recognition based, explains Cédric Malaquin from Yole.
Radar is an alternative technology, enabling privacy and with low power consumption. Google and other radar-based gesture sensing protagonists will push the privacy advantage to differentiate in this competitive market. This is because radar processing is performed at the edge and not in the cloud. Consumer adoption will be the key point, with a choice between consumer privacy concerns and exposure to another radiating device, states Yole.
Regarding the consumer market segment, the adoption of radar technologies is one of the key elements that explains the status of the radar industry today and its future. System Plus Consulting supports Yole in these daily investigations and offers today comprehensive reverse engineering and costing analysis dedicated to the UWB 4D Imaging RF Radar SoC, VYYR2401, extracted from the Walabot Home system, a smart home solution based on radar technology.
Walabot is the consumer brand from Vayyar that offers UWB 4D imaging systems. The company built all its systems based on the RF SoC manufactured by Vayyar. The first SoC developed by Vayyar was the VYYR2401, analyzed in System Plus Consulting’s report. This chip is used in a smartphone add-on device that detects pipes and cables behind walls as well as in a fall detection system, that has been torn down for the report. Without doubt, the added value of Vayyar’s approach is the simplicity of integration. The RF SoC features an on-chip DSP that processes the data from the transceiver.
Stéphane Elisabeth, Technology & Cost Analyst at System Plus Consulting, stated that with an external MCU, it became understandable by any processor with machine learning features on the market, like a Snapdragon from Qualcomm, for example.
Vayyar, a startup company, has indeed seen the potential of a new market in medical and consumer applications, currently with 0.13 % share. The UWB radio frequency SoC from the company was introduced into the market in 2013. Having first developed radar technology in medical applications, such as breath-based cancer detection and fall detection, the company is now diversifying into in-cabin monitoring and ultra-short-range radar in automotive.
Raviv Melamed from Vayyar said that part of their mission to make 4D imaging radar an integral part of day-to-day life, involves creating mature solutions that allow their partners to develop applications seamlessly over their platform. Their Radar-on-Chip features an integrated DSP, MCU and all other analog and digital RF components on one chip, eliminating the need for partners to develop the radar side or to invest extensive resources on all of the software and hardware behind a fully integrated radar solution.
Yole also released a research report which focused on the major transformations and various other aspects of the entire radar industry. Click here to view the report: Status of the Radar Industry: Players Application and technology Trends 2020.
