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In the field of drones, Chinese companies like DJI have felt the crisis to varying degrees. While Huawei is capable of developing its own chips, core chips and components such as CPUs for drone companies are primarily supplied by foreign entities. So, which core chips and components in the drone sector rely on foreign supplies? Let’s conduct a comprehensive overview.
Firstly, this article reviews not only core chips but also core control units such as CPUs in flight control systems, as well as connectors, sensors, and key components like gimbals. Even DJI in certain aspects relies entirely on imports aside from CPUs.
In the drone field, a CPU is essential (except for toy drones that cost a few dozen yuan). The CPUs and overall solutions for drones mainly include DJI’s self-developed flight control system, Qualcomm’s drone design platform Snapdragon Flight, and various CPUs used in open-source platforms like APM and Px4.
1. DJI Self-Developed Flight Control
Some netizens have discovered that DJI’s early flight control used the NXP LPC1768, a consumer-grade 32-bit processor. Later, there may have been an FPGA + DSP solution.
The Spark, released in 2018, used Intel’s Movidius Myriad 2 computer vision processing chip for video processing. Later, it was discovered that it used STMicroelectronics’ STM32F303, Intel’s Movidius MA2155 VPU, Leadcore’s LC1860C SoC, and Atheros/Qualcomm’s AR1021X dual-band Wi-Fi SoC.
The Mavic Mini uses an Ambarella processor for video processing, and it was discovered that the main control CPU for the flight control chip in Mavic is the ATMEL M7 core ATSAME70Q21, with a frequency of 300MHz, integrating 2048KB FLASH and 384KB RAM.
2. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight Platform
Launched in 2015, Qualcomm’s drone design platform Snapdragon Flight has been adopted by companies like ZeroTech and Puzhuo. However, after the consumer market was largely monopolized by DJI, these two companies mainly focused on industrial drones, so Qualcomm’s drone platform and chips have remained at the 2016 architecture and level.
Snapdragon chips integrate wireless communication, sensor integration, and spatial positioning functions. Utilizing
