【Source: Modern Drones】
The drone, known as an “aerial robot,” is an unmanned aircraft operated by radio remote control equipment and an onboard program control device, including unmanned helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, multi-rotor vehicles, unmanned airships, and unmanned parachute wings. According to different usage fields, drones can be divided into three categories: military, civilian, and consumer.
The drone industry chain can be divided into R&D, production, sales, and service, and can be specifically divided into product R&D testing, flight control system development, production of key components such as engines, payload manufacturing, drone assembly, drone sales, drone operation training, operational services, and integrated application services.
The main participants in the drone industry chain include two types: one is manufacturers like DJI and GoPro; the other is upstream manufacturers providing hardware and software for drones, including chips, flight control, batteries, sensors, GPS, gyroscopes, power systems, data systems, image transmission systems, electronic components, and drone training.
1. Overview of the Drone Industry Chain
Moreover, in terms of hardware, chips are the core components that directly determine the drone’s control performance, communication capability, and image processing ability. Drones, like other well-known consumer electronics, have chips, intermediate manufacturers, and peripheral industries, and are not as mysterious and distant as we imagine.
Major manufacturers of drone main control chips include Qualcomm, Intel, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Atmel, Nuvoton, XMOS, NVIDIA, and Rockchip RK3288, among others.
2. Eight Major Drone Main Control Chips
1. STMicroelectronics STM32 Series
The STM32 series includes multiple product lines such as STM32F0/F1/F2/F3/F4/F7/L0/L1/L4, among which the STM32F4 series is widely used in drones. Based on ARM Cortex-M4, the STM32F4 series MCU uses STMicroelectronics’ NVM process and ART accelerator, achieving a processing performance of 225 DMIPS/608 CoreMark at a clock speed of up to 180 MHz when executing from flash memory, which is the highest benchmark score achieved by any microcontroller product based on the Cortex-M core to date.
2. Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight Platform
Snapdragon Flight is a highly optimized 58x40mm development board specifically designed for consumer drones and robotic applications.
Snapdragon Flight includes a Snapdragon 801 SoC (composed of four cores with a frequency of 2.26 GHz), supports GPS, 4K video recording, robust connectivity, and advanced drone software and development tools, dual-channel Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth modules, supports real-time flight control systems, has a global navigation satellite system receiver, supports 4K video processing, and supports fast charging technology, all integrated on a credit card-sized motherboard. These functional components constitute an asynchronous computing platform that supports the development of advanced drone features such as obstacle avoidance and video stabilization.
3. Intel Atom Processor
The Yuneec Typhoon H, which uses real-sense technology in unmanned flying vehicles, features collision avoidance, easy take-off, equipped with a 4K camera and a 360-degree gimbal, and a built-in display screen in the remote control.
A PCI-express custom card using a quad-core Intel Atom processor is employed to process real-time information about distance and sensors, and how to avoid nearby obstacles. From the hardware side, it supports Intel’s real-sense computing 3D camera; from the software side, it is Intel’s