As one of the earliest listed chip companies in China, Allwinner Technology’s strength in this field is beyond doubt. However, in the past, when people talked about this veteran chip maker, the first impression was their strength in the consumer electronics sector. Indeed, thanks to the R&D foundation laid since the tablet era in areas such as smart application processors SoC, high-performance analog devices, and wireless interconnect chips, Allwinner has performed excellently in various product markets including smart hardware, smart robotics, smart home appliances, smart IoT, tablets, network set-top boxes, as well as power analog devices and wireless communication modules in recent years.
Especially in many emerging consumer electronics fields, due to significant advantages, Allwinner’s market share has greatly surpassed its competitors. Over the years, Allwinner has developed into a core supplier for several well-known domestic and international consumer electronics brands. Due to the high product requirements from these brands, Allwinner has continuously refined its chip quality, achieving standards comparable to industrial electronics. For example, a leading white goods manufacturer required a smart refrigerator to have a lifespan exceeding 10 years; a leading robotic vacuum manufacturer had extremely high requirements for motor control and anti-static measures, etc.
Driven by such development, Allwinner naturally extended its chip product line into the industrial sector.
01.
The Industrial Path: Accumulating Strength for Breakthroughs
Although rarely mentioned, Allwinner has been deeply involved in the industrial chip market for a long time.
As early as 2014, the year before Allwinner Technology went public on the A-share market, the company established the Industrial Vehicle Division, focusing on the R&D and market application of high-reliability, high-stability industrial-grade chips. Two years later, Allwinner launched its first dedicated processor T3 for the industrial sector. Nearly ten years after its launch, the Allwinner T3 is still widely used in various industrial products, with cumulative shipments exceeding 50 million units.
After making a strong entry into the industrial market with the T3, Allwinner increased its investment in the industrial sector. By 2018, the company achieved a significant breakthrough in the power market, successfully entering the supply chain of the State Grid. In 2019, the company completed the entire process from R&D to mass production of power products in just one year. In 2020 alone, this product achieved an annual shipment of 1 million units.
Since then, Allwinner has continued to experience rapid growth in the industrial and power markets.
In terms of commercial cooperation:
The company has established strategic partnerships with leading industrial companies such as Inovance Technology and Kunlun Tongtai;
In terms of technological innovation, in 2021, it jointly established an industrial control joint laboratory with Inovance Technology;
In 2022, it launched the industrial-grade octa-core heterogeneous smart application processor T527, which won the title of “National Leading Brand in Industrial Electronics and Automotive Industry Quality”;
In 2023, Allwinner’s T series products passed authoritative certification from the China Software Testing Center and the National Information Technology Security Research Center in terms of performance and safety. In the same year, significant progress was made in the R&D of key industrial IPs such as Localbus, CAN FD, AMP, and ECC;
In 2024, Allwinner made its debut at the China International Industrial Expo, releasing the T536 dedicated chip for industrial control, while also successfully achieving mass production of a project in collaboration with global industrial giant Siemens.
In terms of products:
Allwinner has been continuously enriching its industrial chip lineup over the years. From the early T7, A40i, T507, T517, T113, and T527 to the recent T536 and T736, Allwinner provides a platform SoC solution with full computing power coverage, empowering various industries in the field of industrial intelligence through high-quality processes and advanced IP.
As Pi Jieyong, Deputy General Manager of Allwinner’s Industrial Vehicle Division, stated in a recent speech at the “Allwinner Industrial 2.0 Strategy Launch Conference”:
“After years of development, Allwinner has established a ‘comprehensive industrial-grade, partially automotive-grade’ chip quality system, and the defect rate performance at the market end has fully ‘entered the hundreds’, gaining recognition from leading industrial and automotive customers.”
Being able to break through in this highly competitive market with extreme demands for product performance and quality is attributed to Allwinner’s persistent investment over the years. Reviewing the company’s recent financial reports, Allwinner’s investment in R&D has remained high. According to the financial report data for the first half of this year, Allwinner’s R&D investment during this period was 27,537.92 million yuan, accounting for 20.60% of operating income, an increase of 4.28% compared to the same period last year, providing strong support for the company to create more competitive industrial chips.
At the recent Shanghai Industrial Expo, Allwinner showcased its value-for-money high-performance industrial processor T153.
02.
Product Launch: Exceptional Value
Before detailing the T153, Allwinner’s Vice President of Solution Operations, Zhu Zhenhua, emphasized:“This is an exceptionally valuable ‘industrial chip'”.
It is well known that traditional industrial chips are mostly simple MCU-type chips that can only perform basic industrial control functions, but this is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of emerging industrial scenarios under the AI wave. In this case, some manufacturers resort to using high-performance consumer-grade chips for AI industrial intelligence upgrades, which brings another problem—traditional consumer-grade chips waste performance and functionality in industrial scenarios, and their reliability does not meet common industrial requirements.
Based on these insights, Allwinner Technology has launched the T153. As a chip designed specifically for industrial scenarios, it can be widely applied in PLCs, HMIs, industrial gateways, and other industrial applications, T153 features reliable computing power, high scalability, and an open software ecosystem tailored to smart industrial needs.
In terms of computing power:
The T153 adopts a heterogeneous design with a quad-core Arm® Cortex®-A7 processor and a single-core RISC-V XuanTie E907 processor, ensuring high-performance application processing while achieving high-precision real-time control through dedicated microcontrollers, providing a solid computing foundation for complex industrial automation scenarios.
Additionally, the chip integrates multiple computing units such as ISP image processing and G2D graphics acceleration, supports DDR3 / DDR3L / DDR4 memory, and can deliver powerful computing performance and rapid response, capable of handling high-demand automation tasks.
In terms of scalability:
The T153 benefits from a rich interface configuration.
Zhu Zhenhua explained that the T153 is equipped with three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two CAN-FD interfaces, and LocalBus, supporting high-throughput network connections to meet the needs of complex data-driven applications. Its integrated image signal processor and display engine can provide clear real-time visual feedback for precision manufacturing process management.
As shown in the figure, the T153 also offers 24 GPADC, 6 TWI interfaces, 30 PWM, and other rich interfaces, providing flexibility for diverse applications and facilitating convenient integration and expansion of automation systems.
Moreover, the T153 has an outstanding advantage in terms of security. It is reported that this chip meets industrial safety certification requirements such as IEC-60730 Class-B and PSA L1, ensuring reliable operation in harsh industrial environments. Additionally, the chip offers an extended supply cycle, providing stable assurance for long-term projects of industrial customers.
To gain recognition in the industrial market, having competitive chips is just the foundation; the ability to develop in synergy with software and ecosystem is another challenge posed by the industrial market to chips. This has also been a problem that the Allwinner team has focused on solving in recent years.
03.
Synergy of Software and Hardware Ecosystem
Empowering Smart Industry
The so-called industrial software ecosystem is a diversified ecosystem that is both traditional and innovative, both closed and open:
On one hand, the traditional industrial market has a very large existing stock, and entering this market requires us to adapt our software and interface protocols to the traditional industrial software ecosystem; on the other hand, emerging industrial product forms bring more requirements for SoC chip software solutions, with products like robotic arms, dexterous hands, and industrial-grade AI emerging one after another, imposing new demands on software systems and frameworks.
In terms of software ecosystem, the T153 supports AMP heterogeneous multi-systems (Tina Linux + RTOS + Baremetal), allowing it to flexibly configure multiple different operating systems to meet the high real-time requirements in fields such as industrial automation, forming a complete software ecosystem for smart industry.
“Industrial software requires stability, real-time performance, security, and sustainability, supporting more industrial standard interfaces, compatibility, and strong scalability.” In the speech, Su Jiajia, General Manager of Allwinner’s System Software Center, mentioned. “Allwinner continuously injects new vitality into industrial intelligent applications through continuous innovation in software architecture and ecosystem synergy, providing customers with ‘stable, real-time, secure, and sustainable’ solutions.”
From his introduction, we learned that Allwinner is continuously promoting the optimization of software platform operating systems for real-time performance, compatibility with mainstream industrial protocols, security hardening, and AI edge inference, truly achieving “reliable hardware, easy-to-use software, and a complete ecosystem.” Among them, the distributed architecture software with “one master and multiple slaves” is an important software achievement launched by the company in response to the needs of the industrial sector.
To enable developers to better utilize the company’s industrial chips, Allwinner has actively promoted the integration with mainstream industrial operating systems, protocol stacks, and development tools over the past few years, including collaborations with leading brand customers, solution providers, and software and technology partners, building a complete development ecosystem from chips to systems, from hardware to applications, and jointly promoting the intelligent upgrade of the industry.
As Allwinner stated in the speech, the industrial market is not only a market with dispersed customers and slow returns but also has extreme requirements for product quality, longer supply cycles, and relatively complex service demands. In light of this, Allwinner Technology has made a professional, reliable, long-term, and open commitment in the field of industrial chips.
Of course, Allwinner will continue to invest in software and ecosystem development, building broader and more reliable partnerships to fully empower the industrial transition to intelligence.
In Conclusion
In recent years, with the surge of artificial intelligence, the already budding smart industry has entered a fast track of development, presenting obvious opportunities for industrial chips. Especially in the current global competitive landscape, developing domestic industrial chips is urgent. For Allwinner, which has inherent SoC advantages and has been deeply involved in the high-performance edge computing market for many years, a new opportunity is emerging.
Allwinner has also emphasized that the company will continue to invest in the industrial sector, with higher performance, more advanced processes, and a more complete and rich chip solution platform already in the R&D stage. According to Allwinner, the new generation AI platform chip T736 is expected to be officially launched in the next quarter.
It is reported that this chip integrates a dual-core Arm Cortex-A76 and a six-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU, and is equipped with an NPU unit with a computing power of up to 3 Tops, significantly enhancing AI inference and overall performance. At the same time, the T736 achieves a comprehensive upgrade in multimedia processing, supporting more efficient encoding and decoding capabilities, and can be widely applied in various high-performance demand scenarios such as in-vehicle intelligent cockpits, industrial control computers, edge computing nodes, and industrial robots.
“We are at the historical forefront of domestic substitution, a common opportunity bestowed upon us by the times. We invite more partners to join our ecosystem and jointly define the future of industrial intelligence,” said Zhu Zhenhua, Vice President of Solution Operations at Allwinner Technology.
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