On August 26, during IOTE 2026 Shenzhen, the High-Precision Positioning Technology & Applications Ecosystem Forum was successfully held, bringing together key industry representatives from Changsha Chixin Semiconductor Tech Co., Ltd, Jiangsu Maxscend Microelectronics Co., Ltd, Chengdu KNOWNO Technology Co., Ltd, Silicon Labs, and Antennaware.
The forum featured in-depth discussions on the latest developments in UWB, Bluetooth positioning, and antenna technologies, exploring emerging applications, market trends, and opportunities across the high-precision positioning ecosystem.
01 | Industry Trends: UWB Sensing & Connectivity Integration Gains Momentum, While Smartphone and Automotive Markets Take Different Paths
The forum opened with Zhang Zhongliang, Head of AIoT Xing Tu Research Institute, who presented the latest market analysis of China’s high-precision positioning technology sector in 2026.
He noted that UWB-based integrated sensing and communication is moving from concept toward commercial deployment and has emerged as one of the industry’s key value propositions.
In the automotive sector, UWB digital key technology is increasingly being extended beyond access control to support applications such as CPD radar, kick sensors, and even ultrasonic parking assistance replacement. However, cost remains a major barrier to broader adoption, leading to more conservative penetration expectations. At present, UWB applications are expected to remain concentrated primarily in mid- to high-end vehicle models.
In the two-wheeler market, Niu Technologies has taken the lead in mass-producing a solution that combines UWB digital keys with blind-spot radar, prompting increased interest and follow-up from other industry players.
The smartphone market, meanwhile, has progressed more slowly than initially anticipated. Huawei has shifted its focus toward NearLink (StarLight), while the Xiaomi 17 series has adopted a Qualcomm chipset solution with lower chip costs. However, the pace at which other major smartphone manufacturers, including OPPO and vivo, will adopt UWB remains uncertain.
In the consumer IoT market, smart locks and radar-based sensing for air conditioners are seeing healthy growth, supported by increasing ecosystem alignment. The enterprise market, however, is facing greater pressure as policy-driven applications in sectors such as coal mining and chemical manufacturing approach market saturation.
On the Bluetooth side, the traditional RSSI beacon market continues to contract year by year. By contrast, Bluetooth Tags compatible with Apple Find My have achieved annual shipments of more than 50 million units.
Bluetooth Channel Sounding (CS) is emerging as a competitive technology for applications such as digital keys, although challenges related to power consumption and direction finding remain.
According to Zhang Zhongliang, the industry is moving beyond competition between individual technologies toward a new phase centered on integrated sensing, connectivity, and ecosystem collaboration. While innovation is accelerating in mid- to high-end applications, cost-sensitive markets are placing greater emphasis on balancing practicality, performance, and power efficiency.
02 | Smart Home Applications: UWB Radar Sensing Reshapes the Interactive Experience
Zhou Leilei, Marketing Manager at Changsha Chixin Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd., presented a comprehensive overview of UWB applications across smart home and appliance scenarios, highlighting how UWB is evolving from high-precision positioning to radar-based sensing and redefining the way users interact with smart appliances.
Chixin Semiconductor has been deeply engaged in UWB technology for more than a decade, with cumulative chip shipments reaching tens of millions of units and deployments across dozens of leading global customers.
Zhou highlighted several key advantages of UWB radar, including strong penetration, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) detection, and the ability to detect subtle human movements. Its static human presence detection capabilities can significantly outperform 24GHz and 60GHz mmWave radar, while remaining largely unaffected by lighting conditions, temperature, humidity, smoke, and dust.
In smart appliance applications, Chixin Semiconductor’s CX UWB solution has enabled smart TVs to integrate pointing-based remote control and radar sensing into a single system, reducing the per-unit cost by more than RMB 10.
For air conditioners, the solution supports intelligent airflow strategies such as energy saving when no one is present, gentle airflow toward occupied areas, and natural airflow in unoccupied areas.
Its sleep-monitoring solution requires only a few hundred kilobytes of memory to perform local sleep monitoring, while its smart lock solution combines Aliro-based passive unlocking with radar-based human presence detection, achieving standby power consumption as low as 50 μA and significantly higher positioning accuracy than conventional 24GHz solutions.
By providing a turnkey solution integrating chips, hardware, and algorithms, Chixin Semiconductor is helping appliance manufacturers upgrade product capabilities at minimal additional cost and accelerate the adoption of smart home technologies across a broader range of scenarios.
03 | Comprehensive Digital Key & Sensing Solutions
Ji Te, Senior Marketing Manager of the SoC Product Line at Jiangsu Maxscend Microelectronics Co., Ltd., presented the company’s comprehensive digital key and sensing solution portfolio.
As a leading Chinese provider of RF front-end and wireless SoC technologies, Maxscend is expanding beyond RF front-end products toward a comprehensive portfolio of wireless sensing and connectivity SoCs.
Ji noted that the company has established three major product lines covering BLE 6.0, SLE 2.0 (NearLink), and UWB, including the MXD2678 single-mode and MXD2680 dual-mode Bluetooth chips, as well as the MXD2710 UWB SoC. These products provide integrated solutions for applications such as automotive systems and smart locks.
The dual-mode chip supports a seamless upgrade path from Bluetooth to NearLink. Under the same power consumption, NearLink can achieve data rates up to 6.3 times those of Bluetooth, extend communication range by 2.4 times, and improve interference resistance by 7 dB through Polar coding. The number of supported network nodes can also increase from 8 to more than 200.
The UWB chip delivers ±2 cm ranging accuracy and ±2° angular accuracy, while integrating radar functionality for applications such as kick sensing and sentry monitoring.
The solution portfolio covers a broad range of applications, including digital keys, parking radar, in-cabin occupancy detection, and gesture tracking. Its BSD radar can reliably detect two targets within a range of 40 meters, delivering performance superior to conventional 24GHz solutions.
Leveraging its ChipCore IDM platform, Maxscend conducts in-house development across the full semiconductor value chain, from materials and wafer processing to packaging and testing. The company also provides a comprehensive SDK spanning the physical layer through the application layer, with support for Chinese cryptographic algorithms, enabling customers to rapidly develop differentiated products.
Looking ahead, Maxscend plans to further expand innovative UWB applications across smart vehicles and IoT, driving the next generation of sensing and interactive experiences.
04 | UWB Integrated Sensing & Connectivity: From Ecosystem to Chip
Li Yu, CTO of Chengdu KNOWNO Technology Co., Ltd., introduced the company’s KN01 Integrated Sensing & Connectivity 2.0 SiP, highlighting the latest evolution of UWB technology toward more scenario-specific solutions.
According to Li, the UWB industry is shifting from a chipmaker-driven model toward a solution-provider-driven model. Standard UWB chips are increasingly unable to address the diverse requirements of emerging 2.0 application scenarios, creating an opportunity for scenario-specific SiP solutions.
The KN01 Integrated Sensing & Connectivity 2.0 SiP integrates UWB, BLE, antenna, and IMU technologies into a highly integrated package, supporting direct SMT deployment and targeting four major application areas: automotive, two-wheelers, smart homes, and robotics.
For automotive applications, the automotive-grade KN01 platform supports multiple functions—including digital keys, CPD, kick sensing, sentry monitoring, and parking radar—on a single chip with firmware reuse, delivering overall cost reductions of more than 50%.
For two-wheelers, the solution combines UWB and BLE as an alternative to 77GHz mmWave radar, integrating digital keys, BSD radar, and sentry monitoring into one solution while reducing costs by approximately 50%.
For smart home applications, the compact system supports both pointing-based remote control and radar sensing. In robotics, the solution enables 360° human following and radar-based obstacle avoidance, without dependence on lighting conditions and without cumulative positioning errors.
Zhifou Ruida positions itself around continuous scenario definition and integrated software-hardware solution development. Through a unified SDK and algorithm library, the company aims to develop chips around specific application scenarios, accelerating the adoption of UWB integrated sensing and connectivity as a mainstream sensing technology for intelligent systems.
05 | Multiple Bluetooth Positioning Technologies Integrated with AI-Powered Edge Intelligence
Huang Liangjun, Senior Field Applications Engineer at Silicon Labs, provided a systematic overview of the evolution of Bluetooth positioning technologies and their growing integration with AI.
He noted that Bluetooth positioning is moving from traditional RSSI-based coarse positioning toward a new era enabled by Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding.
Channel Sounding combines Phase-Based Ranging (PBR) and Round-Trip Time (RTT) technologies to achieve sub-meter positioning accuracy in non-line-of-sight environments, with performance reaching less than 1.5 m in NLOS conditions and less than 0.5 m in LOS conditions.
Support for multi-antenna switching and frequency hopping further improves security and resistance to interference.
Silicon Labs’ BG24/MG24 SoCs integrate dedicated AI/ML hardware accelerators, enabling up to 8× faster inference and 6× lower power consumption, supporting a new generation of edge-intelligent positioning applications.
Developed jointly with Unikie, a Bluetooth-based TPMS solution uses positioning technology and machine-learning algorithms to automatically identify tire positions. Meanwhile, Emanate Wireless’ clinical-grade RTLS solution has been deployed in hospital environments.
Huang emphasized that the deeper integration of AI and Bluetooth positioning is moving real-time location systems beyond simply knowing “where something is” toward intelligent contextual sensing.
This evolution is creating new opportunities for applications including digital keys, indoor navigation, asset tracking, and other location-aware services, while delivering greater accuracy and lower power consumption.
06 | Rethinking Wireless Antenna Design for Wearable Devices
How Can We Double Transmission Range While Cutting Power Consumption in Half?
Dr. Matthew Magill, CTO and Co-Founder of Antennaware, explored new approaches to wireless antenna design for wearable devices.
He noted that antennas operating on the human body face three major challenges: resonance frequency shifts, sharply reduced radiation efficiency, and body obstruction. Real-world measurements can show performance degradation of 10–20 dB compared with nominal laboratory specifications.
Testing has shown that when a conventional antenna is worn against the chest, its resonant frequency can shift significantly depending on body shape, while total radiation efficiency can fall to just 5–50%. At frequencies above 6 GHz, signal shadowing caused by the human body can create particularly severe blind spots.
To address these challenges, Antennaware has developed its BodyWave™ surface-wave antenna technology. By exciting surface waves that propagate along the body, the technology redirects energy around shadowed areas while maintaining stable impedance matching and predictable radiation efficiency.
At 2.4 GHz, BodyWave can deliver 10–20 dB higher forward-path gain than conventional PIFA and chip antennas, effectively doubling communication range or enabling transmit power to be reduced to approximately one-quarter of conventional levels.
The technology has been validated in applications including Catapult’s interscapular sports tracking, Hollyland’s full-duplex head-worn audio systems, and Raycom’s Sub-GHz telemetry solutions, demonstrating significantly improved connectivity stability in non-line-of-sight environments.
Antennaware provides chip-level antenna solutions and reference designs that can be rapidly integrated into existing SoC platforms, helping wearable devices achieve more reliable wireless connectivity under real-world on-body conditions.
From Integrated UWB Sensing to AI-Powered Edge Intelligence
From UWB integrated sensing and connectivity and Bluetooth Channel Sounding, to scenario-specific SiP solutions, AI-powered edge intelligence, and fundamental innovation in antenna technology, the forum provided a comprehensive view of both the technological depth and ecosystem breadth of the high-precision positioning industry.
A common view among the speakers was that positioning technology is evolving from simply “knowing where something is” toward an integrated model of connectivity, sensing, intelligence, and computing. The ability to define application scenarios and optimize hardware and software together is expected to become a key competitive differentiator in the next stage of industry development.
With the continued advancement of 4ab standards, declining chip costs, and the increasing availability of AI computing capabilities at the edge, high-precision positioning is expected to penetrate a broader range of consumer and industrial applications over the next five years.
Ultimately, high-precision positioning has the potential to become a fundamental spatiotemporal infrastructure for the intelligent world, providing the underlying location and sensing capabilities needed to connect people, devices, vehicles, and intelligent systems.