Recently, Shanghai Awinic Technology Co., Ltd. (Awinic), a leading Chinese analog-digital mixed-signal IC design company, and Rokid, a global leader in AR glasses operating systems and AI glasses service providers, officially announced a strategic partnership, with Awinic becoming a strategic investment shareholder of Rokid. The two parties will engage in deep collaboration across the entire process—including chip definition, joint R&D, product implementation, and ecosystem development—focused on next-generation spatial computing devices, jointly creating application solutions for the next phase of AI development.
I. Global Industry Consensus: Smart Glasses Become the Ultimate AI Gateway in the Post-Smartphone Era
Currently, a definitive and irreversible strategic consensus has formed across the global technology industry: smart glasses will become the next core AI gateway in the post-smartphone era. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly stated at the 2025 investor conference: "Glasses are the ideal form factor for AI. They allow AI to see, hear, and communicate with you seamlessly around the clock. Those who do not wear them will be at a significant cognitive disadvantage." In December 2025, Google also officially announced that it will launch two AI glasses models powered by its Gemini multimodal large model in the second half of 2026. These will be developed in deep collaboration with brands like Samsung and Gentle Monster, directly competing with Meta's Ray-Ban series.
Market data confirms the explosive nature of this trend. Omdia's latest forecast shows that global AI glasses shipments will exceed 10 million units for the first time in 2026, reaching 35 million units by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47% from 2025 to 2030. Smart Analytics Global is even more optimistic, projecting that global AI glasses revenue will quadruple in 2026, soaring from 1.2billionin2025to1.2billionin2025to5.6 billion, with the US and China accounting for nearly 80% of the global market share. IDC has defined 2026 as the "first year of the AI smart glasses ecosystem," marking the industry's core transition from "seeing" to "thinking."
Awinic's strategic investment and partnership with Rokid—staking an early claim in this golden arena—not only represents technological empowerment for Rokid's products but also marks a milestone for Awinic in validating its AI application solutions and expanding its full-scenario application boundaries.
II. Wave of the Era: Multimodal Perception Reshapes the AI Interaction Paradigm
The explosion of AI technology is fundamentally transforming the nature of human-computer interaction. From keyboards to touchscreens to voice and gestures, interaction is evolving towards being "more natural, more immersive, and more seamless." Multimodal AI, a new generation of technology capable of simultaneously processing text, images, audio, and sensor data, has become a core direction of AI development. Grand View Research forecasts the global multimodal AI market will reach $10.89 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 36.8%.
Leveraging the unique advantages of "first-person perspective sensing, natural multimodal interaction, and all-day wearability," smart glasses have become the ideal hardware carrier for the Agentic AI era. They will break the pattern of the smartphone as a single information hub, truly integrating computing power into every scene of daily life. However, the widespread adoption of smart glasses faces unprecedented technical challenges: their battery capacity is only 1/50 that of a smartphone, yet they must simultaneously support multiple perception capabilities like audio, vision, haptics, and motion, placing extremely demanding requirements on chip integration, power consumption, and performance.
The industry generally agrees that deep, customized chip-level optimization is the core for smart glasses to achieve experiential breakthroughs and differentiated competitiveness. The limitations of general-purpose computing chips in handling concurrent multi-sensor processing, real-time 3D environment understanding, and low-latency human-computer interaction are becoming increasingly apparent. Dedicated chip architectures tailored for spatial computing characteristics have become an inevitable industrial trend.
III. Accumulated Expertise: Awinic Has Comprehensively Positioned Itself for AI Application Product Solutions
As a leading domestic high-performance analog-digital mixed-signal IC design company, Awinic, upholding the corporate spirit of "continuous effort and surpassing in pinpoint areas," has proactively established a blueprint in the smart glasses arena. It has built a complete multimodal perception chip system covering hearing, sight, touch, and power management.
In the auditory dimension—a core sensory gateway in the intelligent world—Awinic has built deep expertise over many years, creating a smart audio solution optimized across the entire chain, from transistor-level design to system-level architecture. Awinic has released AI algorithms for uplink and downlink audio, NPU chips and overall solutions for audio scenarios that are the first to market, low-power audio amplifier chips, and privacy-protected audio solutions. These deliver high-fidelity sound quality and clear far-field voice interaction at milliwatt-level power consumption, perfectly matching the miniaturization and battery life requirements of smart glasses.
Leveraging years of technical accumulation, Awinic has grown into a core provider capable of offering AI application product solutions. The company continues to achieve breakthroughs in display driving, lighting effect control, image signal processing, and other vision-related chip technologies, providing stable and reliable foundational support for AR displays. Its mature power management, haptic feedback, and sensor detection solutions offer a one-stop "audio, visual, haptic, and power" chip solution for smart glasses.
This comprehensive technological blueprint has received wide recognition from global customers. Currently, Awinic's chip products are mass-deployed in products from leading global AI glasses brands such as Meta, Rokid, Xiaomi, Thunderbird, XREAL, and Alibaba (Quark), covering multiple key functional modules including audio, power, lighting effects, sensors, and haptic feedback, with cumulative shipments exceeding 100 million units.
Rokid, a global leader in AR glasses operating systems and AI glasses service providers, has independently developed the YodaOS-XR operating system and possesses core technologies in spatial computing, multimodal AI interaction, and real-time rendering. It also has deep technical expertise and mature end-product implementation experience in AR optics, spatial computing algorithms, and AI large model on-device deployment.
Awinic's strategic investment in and deep partnership with Rokid stem from a high degree of consensus and shared vision for the future of the spatial computing industry. The two parties will engage in deep collaboration starting from chip definition, enabling precise alignment between chip capabilities and terminal requirements, and jointly creating benchmark spatial computing products for the future.
IV. Deep Integration: Co-creating the Next-Generation Spatial Computing Benchmark
By joining forces, Awinic and Rokid will integrate their respective strengths in chip design and terminal applications to tackle key technical challenges such as low-power multimodal perception and on-device AI algorithm acceleration.
Future AI/AR glasses from Rokid will fully incorporate Awinic's AI application product solutions, achieving revolutionary experience upgrades:
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Enhanced Audio Experience: Awinic's smart audio chips will deliver clearer far-field voice interaction, more immersive 3D spatial sound fields, and more precise adaptive environmental noise control, allowing users seamless voice conversations even in complex environments.
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Improved Visuals: Awinic's display driving and lighting effect control chips will enhance AR display brightness, contrast, and color accuracy, providing a more comfortable and realistic visual experience.
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Reduced System Power Consumption: Collaborative optimization across audio, power, display, and other chips will significantly extend device battery life, addressing a core pain point of AR products.
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Revolutionized Interaction: Integrating multimodal perception capabilities like audio, vision, and haptics will create a more natural and fluid spatial computing interaction experience.
V. Capability Migration: From Smart Glasses to Full-Scenario AI Perception Ecosystem
Smart glasses are not only a standalone product category but also a product form representing the new human-computer interaction gateway brought by AI. They are also one of Awinic's key implementation scenarios for securing its position in the application domain of the next AI phase. The mature technologies of miniaturization, low power consumption, and high integration validated on smart glasses can be rapidly migrated to new demands in other AI application fields, forming a development pattern of "breakthrough in one area, flourishing in many."
For Awinic, this strategic investment and partnership carry profound strategic significance. It not only strengthens business collaboration with a leading AI glasses customer but also acts as strategic preparation for seizing future hardware opportunities at new human-computer interaction gateways. More importantly, it serves as an early blueprint, using AI glasses as a lever to implement its solutions across various emerging AI application scenarios.
VI. Moving Forward Together: Empowering Global Smart Industries with "Chinese Chips"
"Using the power of technology to create a better future, and creating value for customers, employees, partners, and shareholders with heart" is the corporate mission that Awinic consistently upholds. Standing at the gateway to the AI era, Awinic will continue to embrace long-termism, increase R&D investment, and deepen core technologies. The partnership with Rokid is a critical step for Awinic to position itself at the next core AI gateway and lay out its full-scenario AI perception ecosystem for the future.
Moving forward, Awinic looks forward to collaborating with more partners across the industrial chain, empowering global smart industries with "Chinese chips" and co-creating a smarter, better future.
About Awinic
Shanghai Awinic Technology Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese analog-digital mixed-signal IC design company, was founded in 2008. It focuses on the design of high-performance analog-digital mixed-signal, power management, and signal chain ICs. The company was successfully listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market in August 2021 (stock code: 688798).
Awinic has accumulated over 40 product categories and nearly 2,000 product models, with product performance and quality at leading industry levels. The company's products are widely used in consumer electronics, industrial IoT, and automotive markets, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart wearables, smart speakers, smart home appliances, mobile payments, IoT, AI education, smart toys, servers, new energy, robotics, drones, security, and automotive electronics.
Awinic continues to invest heavily in high-quality R&D, leading product technology innovation. In recent years, its average R&D investment accounts for over 15% of revenue. Technical staff comprise over 70% of the workforce. The company has obtained over 1,500 intellectual property rights (domestic and international).
Awinic has been recognized as a National Enterprise Technology Center, a Single Champion Enterprise in the Audio Manufacturing sector, a National Intellectual Property Advantage Enterprise, included in the Top 100 Innovative Listed Companies in National High-Tech Zones, a Shanghai Innovation-oriented Enterprise Headquarters, recipient of the Shanghai Quality Gold Award, a Shanghai Municipal Design Innovation Center, the Shanghai Smart Audio Chip Technology Innovation Center, and listed among the Shanghai Top 100 Hardcore Technology Enterprises.
About Rokid
Rokid, founded in 2014, is a product platform company focused on human-computer interaction technology. It was recognized as a National High-Tech Enterprise in 2018. As an explorer and leader in the industry, the company focuses on the R&D of AI/AR glasses and other software/hardware products, as well as ecosystem development centered on the YodaOS operating system. Leveraging research in speech recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, optical displays, chip platforms, and hardware design, Rokid combines cutting-edge AI and AR technologies with industry applications to provide full-stack solutions for clients across various verticals. It delivers significant value in optimizing user experience, helping enterprises reduce costs and improve efficiency, and empowering public services. Its AI and AR products are deployed in nearly 150 countries and regions worldwide.
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