Shanghai HiSilicon used the Consumer Electronics Innovation Conference (CEIC) 2026 in Shenzhen, held October 22 to 24, to cast OpenHarmony, NearLink short-range links, on-device AI and ultra-high-definition media as four ecosystems for what it calls light-intelligence terminals. The pitch targets the large installed base of simple IoT devices that still lack useful connectivity, sensing, local intelligence or a clear interaction surface.
NearLink sits in that story as the hard bus beside OpenHarmony's soft bus. At the event, the International SparkLink Alliance led the release of a NearLink SLE 3.0 Technical Standard Evolution Blue Paper, drafted with more than 60 standards bodies, chip firms, industry partners and universities. The document maps SLE from a 1.0 start built on Polar coding and sub-millisecond latency, through a 2.0 phase that added SLP precision positioning, dual-channel audio and digital-key profiles, into a 3.0 stage focused on faster reliable links, efficient measurement, denser networking and higher-quality audio.
The blue paper is a roadmap, not a finished SLE 3.0 standard and not a chip datasheet. HiSilicon's public NearLink product pages still document SLE 1.0-class radios. What the company showed on the floor were NearLink AI Wi-Fi 7 home networking demos, smart locks and doorbells, home cameras and audio gear that use today's silicon while the alliance sketches the next air-interface steps.
Around the same booth story, HiSilicon pointed to light-intelligence kits built on OpenHarmony: Yueying vision chips and Diting wearable-class chips, CV610 and 3322 development boards, more than 20 ModelZoo models and an end-to-end AI toolchain. Example builds from the same base include a posture-aware study lamp, a pet-seeking robot that the company says recognizes 30 pet behaviors, and a small wheeled robot that combines face recognition with natural-language task scripting. Its HiSpark developer site is described as seeing roughly ten times more downloads and about eight times more activity than a year earlier; those traffic figures are HiSilicon's own.
For the short-range chip story, the takeaway is an alliance blue paper that charts SLE 3.0 while HiSilicon keeps shipping OpenHarmony-plus-NearLink products on current silicon. Readers should treat SLE 3.0 as an evolution plan until the formal specification lands.
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