HiSilicon Partners with Alllink to Transform the Smart Home Industry

Is your dream smart home still a dream?

[Shenzhen, China, June 30, 2020] The unveiling of "smart life" solutions has hardly been seamless over the past two decades. Although more than 85 percent of consumers have heard of smart homes, only a tiny minority actually live in one, due to complex system deployment and sky-high prices. The limitless potential of the consumer market lies in stark contrast to the glacial development of the industry, meaning that smart homes are well within sight but not yet within reach.

Hindered Commercial Deployment for Two Generations of Smart Home Systems

1st gen: Bus system with a star topology. It achieved the automation of some home devices. However, it requires the reconstruction of power lines from a distributed topology to a star topology, as well as an independent system for communications lines. These two cable systems work in parallel, substantially increasing design, implementation, and maintenance-related challenges. Proving even more difficult is that the systems can't be expanded once settled, and that compatibility is poor while costs are high.

2nd gen: Wireless system with a distributed topology. It addresses the cable issues from the previous generation and allows for the deployment of smart home systems that conform with home electrical design standards. This greatly reduces the cost and labor associated with design, implementation, and maintenance, making cozy smart homes accessible to more consumers. Still, the stability and reliability of wireless systems remained a major issue, due to co-channel interference, channel congestion, and signal shielding and attenuation, resulting in a poor user experience.

Transforming the Smart Home Industry One Breakthrough Technology at a Time

The previous two generations are both infeasible because they are subject to core chipsets, protocols, and standards from countries outside China, which may not be compatible with the application environment and construction standards in China. In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the growth of the smart home industry has always been hindered by the bottleneck of communications technologies. The key to this dilemma is through the following technological breakthroughs:
1. Stability, reliability, and flexibility
2. Expandability at any time without re-cabling
3. Real-time, reliable, and stable controls over electrical systems; wireless appliance access
4. Proprietary core chipsets, protocols, and standards

HiSilicon and Alllink Unveil a 3rd Gen PLC-Bus + Wireless Solution

HiSilicon and Alllink have jointly launched the first-ever 3rd gen converged smart home system solution (PLC-BUS + Wireless) that is dedicated to the China market. Their joint efforts have resolved longstanding technical challenges, making smart living viable in any home.

The Alllink all-in-one smart home gateway integrates HiSilicon-powered PLC-BUS and wireless dual-protocol communications capabilities. By using power lines as the communications carrier, PLC-BUS can be deployed without communications lines. The wireless protocols facilitate access to smart devices via Zigbee HA and WiFi.

The 3rd gen adopts the standard modular design of distributed electrical systems. Its simple deployment, compatibility, expandability, and reliability make wired infrastructure and wireless setup in homes easier than ever. The new solution does not require additional intelligent control boxes and communications lines to achieve interconnectivity. Furthermore, its powerful edge compute capabilities allow for local smart applications to run even when there is no network connection.

Success Case — LARIVE GAUCHE

LARIVE GAUCHE is a benchmark smart home project that is located in a core business district in Tianjin, China.

LARIVE GAUCHE all-in-one smart home solution is based on Alllink's 3rd gen PLC-BUS + Wireless technology. The electrical systems, including lighting, sunshade, air conditioning, and fresh air systems, all use the PLC-BUS distributed bus. The consumer devices support Zigbee HA and WiFi access. It harnesses the Huawei HiLink all-in-one smart home solution to achieve automatic, and context-specific smart applications.

Alllink All-in-One Smart Home Solution

About Alllink
Alllink is a high-tech enterprise dedicated to R&D, manufacturing, and sales of intelligent software and hardware. A major area of focus is research on wired and wireless convergence, in particular its collaboration with HiSilicon in launching the world's first-ever commercial PLC-BUS + Wireless technology, which is widely applied to IoT systems, including lighting, air conditioning, fresh air circulation, control panels, household appliances, street lamps, and metering systems. Alllink's solutions encompass IoT communications modules, appliance modules, and SaaS cloud platforms that span the entire value chain, and bolster partner products with greater reliability and intelligence.