Longsys‘s Industrial Storage Brand FORESEE Helps Shape the Future of Drones

On February 4, the Winter Games officially began with the opening ceremony at the Bird's Nest, where 2022 drones hovered in the air, putting on a dazzling show for this much-anticipated event.

New drone technologies are everywhere in the Winter Olympic Games: hydrogen drones safeguard power transmission to the Olympic venues across 666 kilometers of mountains, the firefighting drone squad works 24 hours for forest fire prevention, and the drone-assisted acceleration system effectively helps cross-country skiers train at high speed in bends, etc. This world-renowned event offers a glimpse into China's technological innovation.

Thanks to mature technologies, as well as lower manufacturing costs and lower access barriers in recent years, China's drone industry has grown rapidly, and especially civilian drones have outperformed with a growth rate of more than 50% for three consecutive years (data source: China Research Institute of Industry).

Civilian drones are divided into two categories: consumer drones and industrial drones. According to Drone Industry Insights, a German drone research firm, the drone market will reach $42.8 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 13.8%. Asia is expected to become the world's largest drone market by 2025.

Cross-industry optimization and upgrading

Extensive drone application market

Drones are not only popular in the consumer market, but are also common in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, plant protection, power inspection, geographic mapping, aerial photography, logistics, firefighting, high-altitude security, water conservancy, land surveying, and more.

The popularity of drones has greatly expanded space and shortened the time for information collection. Further flight, HD optical cameras, and airborne SAR imaging systems enable us to collect information that used to be inaccessible, and that allows us to achieve more. The collection of information, writing, storing, compressing, transmitting, and decompressing are all dependent on the support of data storage systems.

Case Study

One of the biggest challenges faced by rescue teams during mountain rescue missions is searching for and identifying people in need. At high peaks and mountain elevations, the location and condition of victims are inaccessible, which makes it more difficult to develop a rescue plan in advance. In the past, rescue teams had to check every scenario by climbing over the cliffs, and adapting the search and rescue methods during the rescue missions. All of these extreme challenges were addressed in demanding weather conditions.

Drones aid volunteers in searching in various temperature and terrain conditions and help improve the efficiency of rescue missions while maintaining the safety of rescuers. The 4K cameras on the drones can capture high-resolution images of the rescue situation in real time and store the video for future data analysis and simulation drills.

Therefore, these drones are usually equipped with highly reliable mass storage products to ensure stable operation in environments with extreme temperatures, high humidity, vibration, and other harsh conditions.

Pain Points of Drones

Opportunities and Challenges

01 High Data Throughput

A drone that supports 4K video recording generates more than 20GB of data in a single 30-minute flight, which requires high erase and write speed and large memory.

02 Short Battery Life

Battery life is essential for drone operations. The battery life and stability determine the breadth of drone applications and purposes, which also challenges the power consumption of embedded storage.

03 Data Security

As China pays great importance to personal privacy and security, and the data produced, stored and transmitted by drones tend to be under the full control of the user, the storage industry continues to improve the data encryption capabilities of products to ensure that they can meet the technical specifications and information security of different industries in different regions.

04 Reliability

In security, fire and disaster relief, and other sectors, drones need to ensure data writing stability and storage reliability under high temperatures, wet conditions, impact, and long working hours.

The right solution

makes drones more stable

With its industrial storage product solutions and rich delivery experience, FORESEE, the industrial storage brand of Longsys, offers a variety of storage products for drones with different specifications and form factors.

Industrial-grade pSLC microSD

Capacities: 8GB – 128GB

Operating temperature: -40℃ – 85℃

Sequential read and write speeds: 88/100MB/s

The industrial-grade pSLC microSD complies with industrial-grade standards and undergoes stringent industrial-grade packaging and sorting tests. Even if the drone encounters an accident during operation, the power failure protection function can protect the memory card from data loss.

Parallel NAND Flash

Storage: 512Mbit-4Gbit

Operating temperature: -40℃ – 85℃

This flagship product adopts a 16nm process, comes with a 4-bit ECC checksum, high density, and offers 512Mbit to 4Gbit storage options. Miniature and lightweight

DDR3L

Storage: 2Gbit-4Gbit

Operating temperature: -40℃–95℃

Speed: 1866 Mbps

The low-power, miniature DDR3L meets the drone's requirements for small size and long battery life. Its operating temperature range of -40℃ – 95℃ ensures high-speed data caching in extreme environments.

DDR4

Storage: 1GB

Operating temperature: 0℃ – 85℃

Speed: 2666/3200Mbps

FORESEE DDR4 employs the state-of-the-art 1α nm process. The light, thin and compact DDR4 triggers the temperature auto-refresh function under high temperatures, and its built-in temperature sensor increases the self-refresh frequency to eliminate data errors.

XS300 SATA SSD

Capacities: 128GB – 1TB

Operating temperature: 0℃ – 70℃

Read/write speed: 550/520MB/s

FORESEE XS300 SATA SSD adopts LDPC error correction technology, offering 2-3 times the error correction ability of conventional BCH technology. This product leverages the high-quality resources of the original plant and offers up to 1TB of capacity. It is ideal for drones with higher requirements for capacity and read/write speeds.

Quantitative change

leads to qualitative change

FORESEE has undergone rigorous product testing to ensure the compatibility and reliability of its storage products.

In terms of compatibility, Longsys has a quality lab with nearly 1,000 professional digital devices, which can test the compatibility of popular platforms, brands, and devices on the market.

▲ Longsys Quality Lab

For better reliability, Longsys has customized a high-speed, high-frequency, large-scale, low-power automated testing bench based on the 10nm ASIC chip testing solution: LS428, and independently developed its own testing program which can test up to 4800 pcs simultaneously and realize speed tests (up to 1600MHz), function tests and high-temperature aging tests. It is worth mentioning that Longsys has developed an innovative test socket for high-temperature testing, which can achieve a linear temperature rise from 0℃ to 125℃, without the need to follow the conventional high-temperature testing scheme of taking the chip off the bench and delivering it to the high-temperature chamber.

▲ 10nm ASIC Testing System

In May 2021, FORESEE, an industrial storage brand owned by Longsys, made its debut at the 2021 Shenzhen International UAV Expo, sharing a series of storage products for drones and successful cases, and garnering recognition and opinions from peers and customers. This year, Longsys will also continue to track the drone industry dynamics and market demand, strengthen its presence as a technology-based storage brand through technological innovation and improved product services, and empower the drone industry in terms of application innovation and storage.