Category: SoC

Standard vs Proprietary Technology

There’s a thought provoking article, by Lorenzo Amicucci, on the Nordic Semiconductor blog on End-User Factors Impacting Industrial IoT Connectivity. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers. While the article talks about Industrial IoT Connectivity and by implication Bluetooth Mesh, the insights are applicable to any project that has to choose between standard or proprietary technology.

The main conclusion is that the best solution from a technical perspective is not always best for the customer. Instead, the best solution should depend on the longer-term business strategy. While a proprietary technology can have the advantage of differentiating your offering it can suffer from future limited supplier availability and possibly shorter lifetime of the technology. Large rollouts:

“…want the confidence that a huge capital spend won’t be wasted on a technology that will be left obsolete in a couple of years.”

More specfically, new and second sourced products from other vendors need to guarantee interoperability for the lifetime of your project.

Read about Generic Beacons

Wiliot Set to Disrupt the Beacon Industry

Last week we met with Steve Statler, better known as Mr Beacon. Steve has joined Wiliot at their SVP Marketing & Business Development.

Wiliot are interesting because they have the potential to disrupt the beacon industry. They have secured $19m in funding to create ultra thin beacons that use energy harvesting rather than batteries. In order to do this, they will become a semiconductor company much like Nordic, TI, Dialog and NXP whose system on a chip (SoC) products are used in existing beacons. Wiliot will create their own SoC that will be packaged much like current NFC tags that can be stuck onto things.

Proof of concepts are scheduled for 2H 2018 with production in mid 2019. The aim is to sell millions of these things in products such as clothing, packaging, electronics and toys. This scale will mean they will only cost of the order of tens of cents/euros/pounds. While Wiliot expect their beacons to be manufactured into things, they expect to offer stand-alone ‘stickers’ that can be attached to anything. They also plan versions with sensors that might also disrupt the IoT industry.

Energy harvesting will take energy from the airwaves from WiFi and similar 2.4GHz products, including ironically, other beacons! They won’t get much energy this way so the range will be small, a few meters, for initial devices. They aim to improve the range in later product iterations, presumably through the use of better energy storage devices such as supercapacitors.

We will be following Wiliot, hope to stock their products and will be offering consultancy and development based on their technology.

Latest Nordic Wireless Quarter Magazine Available

Beacons are small computers with a complete System on a Chip (SoC). There are four main companies that manufacturer SoCs: TI, Dialog, NXP and Nordic. Nordic is the most popular SoC for use in beacons, mainly because of the lower (tool) license cost and ease for beacon manufacturers developing the software (actually called firmware) that runs in the beacons.

Nordic has a new free Wireless Quarter Magazine that showcases uses of Nordic SoCs in many types of device, not just beacons.

The magazine also has articles on how Nordic is the first to launch a Bluetooth mesh Software Development Kit, how Mesh strengthens Bluetooth wireless’ IoT credentials and explains Bluetooth 5’s advertising extensions. The article says of Bluetooth 5’s advertising extensions:

“Advertising extensions, periodic advertisements, and connectionless broadcast will have a major impact on beacons”

However, the article says:

“This won’t happen overnight because few current smartphones incorporate Bluetooth 5, but expect beacons to proliferate over the next several years as new smartphones are rolled out”

New Minew Firmware

Minew have announced new beacon firmware for their newer Nordic nRF52832 based beacons. nRF52 consumes less power than nRF51 based designs. The new firmware and apps support iBeacon and Eddystone (URL, UID, TLM) broadcasting simultaneously.

Beacons supporting the new firmware include the E2 Max Beacon, i7 Rock Beacon, C7 Card Beacon and C6 Wearable Beacon that we hope to have in stock in the near future.

View our current Minew beacons.

Nordic Releases nRF52810

Nordic, who supply the System On a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, have recently released the nRF52810 SoC.

Nordic already offer the nRF52840 and nRF52832 but while these have been suitable for use in Bluetooth 5 beacons they are over-specified and hence too expensive for use in most beacons. The nRF52810 solves this problem by providing a reduced feature set that makes this SoC typically 25% less expensive. Nordic say:

“The nRF52810 represents the most accessible, single-chip Bluetooth 5 solution available on the market today.”

A post on the Nordic devzone explains the main differences between the nRF52810 and nRF52832. It’s mainly removal NFC and other peripherals that aren’t important for beacons.

The nRF52810 supports Bluetooth 5 high speed and advertising extensions but, interestingly, not long range. It’s expected that the removal of the redundant peripherals should also improve power and hence battery use.

More Silicon Manufacturers Eyeing Bluetooth LE

Following Toshiba, silicon manufacturers are becoming more active in the Bluetooth LE space. STMicroelectronics have announced their Latest SoC, the BlueNRG-1 and Fujitsu have announced the FWM7BLZ20 module.

The BlueNRG-1 has a SPI interface to communicate with an application processor suggesting use within other larger hardware systems while the Fujitsu FWM7BLZ20 is a pre-certified module with integrated antenna, based on the Nordic nRF52832, allowing you to get to market quicker.

While these new products are suitable for beacon related products, their use is more likely to be targeted at Bluetooth LE IoT applications.