6 ms·

Why are wifi ICs so expensive? It seems to me that it is cheaper to buy an ESP32 to connect to a RP2040 for wifi than it is to buy a dedicated wifi IC.

by ryao 2y ago

equestria 2y ago
The wifi protocol is computationally intensive. The wifi module is effectively a fast 32-bit computer with fairly complex firmware. And then, there's all the RF engineering that needs to happen to make it work. So, the original thinking was "if you need wifi, we can't price a standalone chip competitively, just buy a SoC". But the genius of ESP32 was that they approached it the other way round: they built a wifi chip, and then figured they can carve out some room for user code. No need to pay for a separate MCU. This worked for a lot of customers, and the economies of scale took care of the rest.
- rkagerer 2y ago
  How is progress toward a useable open source alternative?
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Virtually non-existent? There aren't that many people doing open RF hardware, and all of the ones I'm familiar with are working with SDR because the costs go up massively once you go to tapeout.
  - ryao 2y ago
    I am not sure if you can still get the chips, but these are fully OSS: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
- brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  Why doesnt Apple use ESP32
  - epcoa 2y ago
    While they’re only now coming out with even a 5GHz model there isn’t really much in Apple’s product line that needs a lowend primarily “IoT” WiFi. Maybe the HomePod, but they already have better chipsets for their flagship devices.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    Because the ESP can only barely do WiFi. You can get a couple of Mbps under ideal conditions. It is not a general purpose WiFi adapter, it's a low power IoT chip. A general purpose WiFi adapter can do gigabit sustained connections over PCI or some other high speed interface. Entirely different class of chip.
    - emilfihlman 2y ago
      A couple? It easily goes to tens of Mb/s.
      - yonatan8070 2y ago
        Which is still abysmal compared to what a modern Wi-Fi chipset can push, even in the real world. Even an old home-grade Wi-Fi 5 AP can push >400Mbps over the air in real-world conditions. And the Wi-Fi 6/6e/7 devices can go well above that.
      - shakna 2y ago
        Anecdote only: I've never consistently managed 10mb/s without integrating some sort of cooling system. Not without frying the chip.
      - leptons 2y ago
        Citation needed.
  - chedabob 2y ago
    To what end? I can't think of an Apple product that needs low power Wifi and/or Bluetooth, and also operates at such a low price-point that there's not budget to put something bigger on the BoM.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  To chime in, adding the espressif WiFi libraries to your firmware adds 500-600KB of code. In the trivial IoT widget I just made, the firmware is >90% espressif code by weight. The RAM use is also... noticeable. It takes quite a lot for this chip do WiFi.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    It is similar for BLE. I recently wrote firmware for nrf52 device. Proprietary blob was 100 KB. My code was 60 KB and actually like 40-50 KB was caused by crypto library which is basically required part of BLE stack as well, just distributed with code and not in the blob.
  - zazaulola 2y ago
    ESP32 has 18 ADC input channels. But if you are using Wifi, you can only use 8 of the 18 for ADC conversion: GPIO pins 32-39. Other 10 pins, on which ADC2 channels are possible, can only accept pulse data if you are using Wifi. This is probably due to firmware limitations.
    - mystified5016 2y ago
      Espressif implies that the WiFi hardware uses ADC2 for something. It sounds like a hardware limitation, a firmware issue would have been patched a long time ago.
- ryao 2y ago
  It sounds like Qualcomm missed an opportunity here: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
- numpad0 2y ago
  Wi-Fi chips always had "user" program area, in theory anyone could call any of chip vendor, and with NDA, $$$ an 5 years of back and forth, could have met the exact same goal as what you can do today with ESP32, even in 2010. I've seen a Twitter ticker display made from a mPCI Wi-Fi card in a maker meeting back then. The guy demoing it was a company engineer with access to internal docs, wasn't giving it to anyone else. The genius of Espressif was that they didn't issue C&D letters and DMCA takedowns when people started modifying firmware for their product using garden variety GCC without even asking and then ported hobbyist garbage called Arduino Core. They did initially panic a bit, but soon their management realized it's a golden ticket to something, and they bet the whole company on it. And they got the return they deserve. There aren't a lot of aspects that are technically so advanced about ESP8266/ESP32. It's just the ones made by the hungriest and most aspiring Wi-Fi chip manufacturer.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Is there a write up somewhere talking about the panicking? It might be interesting to read. I am curious how they enabled people to do this without realizing people would do it.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      I wasn't in the scene directly but was only watching it from great distance. It was literally a decade ago, too. Maybe someone can ask Espressif for their side of battle story, but I don't have any more to offer, sorry.
phoronixrly 2y ago
I also share the opinion of the fellow commentor and blame the price on the fact that RF front-ends require lots of RnD, often require high quality and precision components (outside the IC) AND on top of that there are testing and certification costs. All of this in just the RF front-end, we are not even talking about the implementation of the absurdly bloated wifi standars in software/silicon and testing and certification for them.
userbinator 2y ago
Only the ones which have a presence outside of China are expensive.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Why is that? Cost of labor? Looser regulatory requirements?
  - tw04 2y ago
    He’s telling you that they violate IP law extensively in products that don’t leave the country. It’s a lot cheaper to mass produce cheap WiFi chips when you can do it with stolen IP.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      They have a very different view of IP than the west. Sharing is the norm.
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        Does that work for other things? Can I just say “I had a different view of that” and get away with whatever it was?
        vbezhenar 2y ago
        For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it. So they have completely different attitude to those two behaviours.
        aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it. Relevant: Copying Is Not Theft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for. Copying is not theft. If I copy yours you have it too One for me and one for you That’s what copies can do If I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus, but if I just copy it there’s one for each of us! Making more of a thing, that is what we call “copying” Sharing ideas with everyone That’s why copying is FUN!
nereye 2y ago
The WiFi (& Bluetooth) IC used in the Pi Pico W retails for ~$2.5, and presumably a bit less in volume (considering the Pico W is only $2 more than the base Pi Pico.
- ryao 2y ago
  Where can you find it for $2.5? The last I looked, it was around $6.
  - ta988 2y ago
    They are talking about the radio chip that's on the Pico W. not the whole pico w.
    - ryao 2y ago
      I am asking about the radio chip. The last I checked, buying one from a distributor costs around $6. You would need to do a huge order to get the price down to $2.5 per chip. The required order quantity is so huge that distributors do not list it.
      - nereye 2y ago
        From https://octopart.com/search?q=CYW43439&currency=USD&specs=0 https://octopart.com/search?q=CYW43439&currency=USD&specs=0. Indeed the lowest price $2.551 from Arrow has a MOQ of 5000 but Newark does have it for a promotional price of $2.73 for quantities as low as 1. It’s not $2.5 but that’s why it was quoted as ~$2.5 in my reply, since it’s in the ballpark.
        ryao 2y ago
        Thanks. I had not known about octopart.
- blkhawk 2y ago
  you can get certain variants of the esp32 at around 2USD. that gets you a whole board with USB-c.
Aurornis 2y ago
The Espressif chips are WiFi ICs. You can buy the bare chips, connect over SDIO, load the hosted firmware, and use them as WiFi radio chips. For volume production (10K, 100K, or more units) you can get other WiFi ICs that are cheaper than buying an ESP32 module. The difference is that other companies don’t care about engaging the hobby and low volume markets so they don’t put an effort into making them cheap. If you’re doing one-off builds, you’re at the mercy of whoever decides to make an effort to make things cheap and accessible. Some companies deliberately make their products hard or even impossible to access for hobbyists because it’s not worth it unless you’re the hobbyist market leader (Espressif)
- ryao 2y ago
  Do you mean this firmware? https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted I assume it uses the blob that is mentioned in the video.
askvictor 2y ago
The ESP8266 (the predecessor to the ESP32) was initially sold as a wifi IC, using an AT protocol over UART to communicate with the host MCU. Then some people discovered how to use it directly as an MCU, and the documentation and SDK slowly started being made available. As for why? Regulatory (FCC) compliance is probably a part of it, I think the ealy ESP chips were dubious in this regard. Licensing might be a factor as well (a lot of wifi chips use ARM cores; Espressif doesn't, though not sure how much of a factor this is). Support comes into it too - established wifi vendors provide support and help you with RF designs; Espressif has forums (maybe larger customers get proper support now?)

Why are wifi ICs so expensive? It seems to me that it is cheaper to buy an ESP32 to connect to a RP2040 for wifi than it is to buy a dedicated wifi IC.

by ryao 2y ago

Why are wifi ICs so expensive? It seems to me that it is cheaper to buy an ESP32 to connect to a RP2040 for wifi than it is to buy a dedicated wifi IC.

equestria 2y ago

The wifi protocol is computationally intensive. The wifi module is effectively a fast 32-bit computer with fairly complex firmware. And then, there's all the RF engineering that needs to happen to make it work. So, the original thinking was "if you need wifi, we can't price a standalone chip competitively, just buy a SoC". But the genius of ESP32 was that they approached it the other way round: they built a wifi chip, and then figured they can carve out some room for user code. No need to pay for a separate MCU. This worked for a lot of customers, and the economies of scale took care of the rest.

rkagerer 2y ago
How is progress toward a useable open source alternative?
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Virtually non-existent? There aren't that many people doing open RF hardware, and all of the ones I'm familiar with are working with SDR because the costs go up massively once you go to tapeout.
- ryao 2y ago
  I am not sure if you can still get the chips, but these are fully OSS: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Why doesnt Apple use ESP32
- epcoa 2y ago
  While they’re only now coming out with even a 5GHz model there isn’t really much in Apple’s product line that needs a lowend primarily “IoT” WiFi. Maybe the HomePod, but they already have better chipsets for their flagship devices.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  Because the ESP can only barely do WiFi. You can get a couple of Mbps under ideal conditions. It is not a general purpose WiFi adapter, it's a low power IoT chip. A general purpose WiFi adapter can do gigabit sustained connections over PCI or some other high speed interface. Entirely different class of chip.
  - emilfihlman 2y ago
    A couple? It easily goes to tens of Mb/s.
    - yonatan8070 2y ago
      Which is still abysmal compared to what a modern Wi-Fi chipset can push, even in the real world. Even an old home-grade Wi-Fi 5 AP can push >400Mbps over the air in real-world conditions. And the Wi-Fi 6/6e/7 devices can go well above that.
    - shakna 2y ago
      Anecdote only: I've never consistently managed 10mb/s without integrating some sort of cooling system. Not without frying the chip.
    - leptons 2y ago
      Citation needed.
- chedabob 2y ago
  To what end? I can't think of an Apple product that needs low power Wifi and/or Bluetooth, and also operates at such a low price-point that there's not budget to put something bigger on the BoM.
mystified5016 2y ago
To chime in, adding the espressif WiFi libraries to your firmware adds 500-600KB of code. In the trivial IoT widget I just made, the firmware is >90% espressif code by weight. The RAM use is also... noticeable. It takes quite a lot for this chip do WiFi.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  It is similar for BLE. I recently wrote firmware for nrf52 device. Proprietary blob was 100 KB. My code was 60 KB and actually like 40-50 KB was caused by crypto library which is basically required part of BLE stack as well, just distributed with code and not in the blob.
- zazaulola 2y ago
  ESP32 has 18 ADC input channels. But if you are using Wifi, you can only use 8 of the 18 for ADC conversion: GPIO pins 32-39. Other 10 pins, on which ADC2 channels are possible, can only accept pulse data if you are using Wifi. This is probably due to firmware limitations.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    Espressif implies that the WiFi hardware uses ADC2 for something. It sounds like a hardware limitation, a firmware issue would have been patched a long time ago.
ryao 2y ago
It sounds like Qualcomm missed an opportunity here: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
numpad0 2y ago
Wi-Fi chips always had "user" program area, in theory anyone could call any of chip vendor, and with NDA, $$$ an 5 years of back and forth, could have met the exact same goal as what you can do today with ESP32, even in 2010. I've seen a Twitter ticker display made from a mPCI Wi-Fi card in a maker meeting back then. The guy demoing it was a company engineer with access to internal docs, wasn't giving it to anyone else. The genius of Espressif was that they didn't issue C&D letters and DMCA takedowns when people started modifying firmware for their product using garden variety GCC without even asking and then ported hobbyist garbage called Arduino Core. They did initially panic a bit, but soon their management realized it's a golden ticket to something, and they bet the whole company on it. And they got the return they deserve. There aren't a lot of aspects that are technically so advanced about ESP8266/ESP32. It's just the ones made by the hungriest and most aspiring Wi-Fi chip manufacturer.
- ryao 2y ago
  Is there a write up somewhere talking about the panicking? It might be interesting to read. I am curious how they enabled people to do this without realizing people would do it.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    I wasn't in the scene directly but was only watching it from great distance. It was literally a decade ago, too. Maybe someone can ask Espressif for their side of battle story, but I don't have any more to offer, sorry.

phoronixrly 2y ago

I also share the opinion of the fellow commentor and blame the price on the fact that RF front-ends require lots of RnD, often require high quality and precision components (outside the IC) AND on top of that there are testing and certification costs. All of this in just the RF front-end, we are not even talking about the implementation of the absurdly bloated wifi standars in software/silicon and testing and certification for them.

userbinator 2y ago

Only the ones which have a presence outside of China are expensive.

phoronixrly 2y ago
Why is that? Cost of labor? Looser regulatory requirements?
- tw04 2y ago
  He’s telling you that they violate IP law extensively in products that don’t leave the country. It’s a lot cheaper to mass produce cheap WiFi chips when you can do it with stolen IP.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    They have a very different view of IP than the west. Sharing is the norm.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      Does that work for other things? Can I just say “I had a different view of that” and get away with whatever it was?
      - vbezhenar 2y ago
        For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it. So they have completely different attitude to those two behaviours.
        aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > For many people, information and physical items are completely different entities. When you steal bottle of milk, the original owner loses access to it. When you copy information without permission, the original owner keeps the access to it. Relevant: Copying Is Not Theft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for. Copying is not theft. If I copy yours you have it too One for me and one for you That’s what copies can do If I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus, but if I just copy it there’s one for each of us! Making more of a thing, that is what we call “copying” Sharing ideas with everyone That’s why copying is FUN!

nereye 2y ago

The WiFi (& Bluetooth) IC used in the Pi Pico W retails for ~$2.5, and presumably a bit less in volume (considering the Pico W is only $2 more than the base Pi Pico.

ryao 2y ago
Where can you find it for $2.5? The last I looked, it was around $6.
- ta988 2y ago
  They are talking about the radio chip that's on the Pico W. not the whole pico w.
  - ryao 2y ago
    I am asking about the radio chip. The last I checked, buying one from a distributor costs around $6. You would need to do a huge order to get the price down to $2.5 per chip. The required order quantity is so huge that distributors do not list it.
    - nereye 2y ago
      From https://octopart.com/search?q=CYW43439&currency=USD&specs=0 https://octopart.com/search?q=CYW43439&currency=USD&specs=0. Indeed the lowest price $2.551 from Arrow has a MOQ of 5000 but Newark does have it for a promotional price of $2.73 for quantities as low as 1. It’s not $2.5 but that’s why it was quoted as ~$2.5 in my reply, since it’s in the ballpark.
      - ryao 2y ago
        Thanks. I had not known about octopart.
blkhawk 2y ago
you can get certain variants of the esp32 at around 2USD. that gets you a whole board with USB-c.

Aurornis 2y ago

The Espressif chips are WiFi ICs. You can buy the bare chips, connect over SDIO, load the hosted firmware, and use them as WiFi radio chips. For volume production (10K, 100K, or more units) you can get other WiFi ICs that are cheaper than buying an ESP32 module. The difference is that other companies don’t care about engaging the hobby and low volume markets so they don’t put an effort into making them cheap. If you’re doing one-off builds, you’re at the mercy of whoever decides to make an effort to make things cheap and accessible. Some companies deliberately make their products hard or even impossible to access for hobbyists because it’s not worth it unless you’re the hobbyist market leader (Espressif)

ryao 2y ago
Do you mean this firmware? https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted I assume it uses the blob that is mentioned in the video.

askvictor 2y ago

The ESP8266 (the predecessor to the ESP32) was initially sold as a wifi IC, using an AT protocol over UART to communicate with the host MCU. Then some people discovered how to use it directly as an MCU, and the documentation and SDK slowly started being made available. As for why? Regulatory (FCC) compliance is probably a part of it, I think the ealy ESP chips were dubious in this regard. Licensing might be a factor as well (a lot of wifi chips use ARM cores; Espressif doesn't, though not sure how much of a factor this is). Support comes into it too - established wifi vendors provide support and help you with RF designs; Espressif has forums (maybe larger customers get proper support now?)