Design for Ultra-Low Power LTE: CEVA Webinar

You might have thought that ultra-low power communication for the IoT was limited to standards like BT5 and 802.15.4 (eg in ZigBee and Thread) which depend on gateways to cellular networks and limit reach, especially deep inside buildings. But now there’s a new standard for ultra-low power and ultra-low cost based on LTE, known as Cat-NB1. If you want to understand more about communications options for your IoT devices, you should attend this Webinar.

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Summary
The 3GPP recently completed the standardization of a new LTE-based narrowband technology to support the emerging needs of cellular-IOT devices. Known as Cat-NB1 (formerly NB-IoT), this new low data rate category will enable the development of ultra-low power, ultra-low cost solutions that can leverage the existing LTE infrastructure for a new wave of connected devices. However, in order to efficiently leverage the Cat-NB1 standard, a new approach to cellular SoC design is required, where low data rate transfer in very large time intervals is the goal. As such, solution designers might step out of their “comfort zone” and reevaluate existing modem solutions.

Join CEVA experts to hear about:

• A Cellular IoT market overview
• Introduction to Cat-NB1
• Cat-NB1 design considerations and SoC architecture overview
• CEVA’s solution compared to traditional designs

Target Audience
Communication and system engineers targeting cellular IoT segment as well as similar Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWA) standards; IoT solution designers interested in low-end devices with low throughput requirement

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Emmanuel Gresset – Business Development Director, CEVA Wireless BU

Tal Shalev – Senior Communication System Architect, CEVA Wireless BU

Naturally, CEVA already has solutions in this space. As the leading licensor of signal processing IPs for smarter, connected devices, CEVA together with NextG-Com Limited (NextG-Com) has introduced two pre-integrated narrowband LTE solutions designed to simplify the development of Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 (NB-IoT) modems for cost-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The solutions incorporate the recently introduced CEVA-X1 single-core IoT processor together with NextG-Com’s ALPSLite-M Cat-M1 or ALPSLite-NB Cat-NB1 protocol stacks, in a highly compact and power-efficient manner. Addressing the cost-sensitive nature of cellular IoT devices, the CEVA-X1 is capable of handling the full DSP and CPU processing loads for these modems, eliminating the requirement for a CPU controller in the system. Furthermore, the solutions have been carefully optimized to ensure smallest memory footprint, minimizing the requirements for costly embedded flash and static RAM. Ensuring maximum power efficiency for long life cellular IoT applications such as asset trackers or smart meters, the CEVA-X1 incorporates dedicated NB-IoT instructions, allowing it to operate at a clock speed of less than 100MHz for a complete Cat-NB1 solution.

“Cellular IoT offers huge potential in terms of the breadth of applications it will enable and the massive global scale on which these devices can be deployed,” said Denis Bidinost, Chief Executive Officer of NextG-Com. “Our partnership with CEVA brings together their dedicated IoT processor with fully-optimized implementations of our Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 protocol stacks to significantly simplify the integration of narrowband LTE connectivity into cost-sensitive, power-optimized IoT product designs.”

CEVA is the leading licensor of signal processing IP for a smarter, connected world. We partner with semiconductor companies and OEMs worldwide to create power-efficient, intelligent and connected devices for a range of end markets, including mobile, consumer, automotive, industrial and IoT. Our ultra-low-power IPs for vision, audio, communications and connectivity include comprehensive DSP-based platforms for LTE/LTE-A/5G baseband processing in handsets, infrastructure and machine-to-machine devices, computer vision and computational photography for any camera-enabled device, audio/voice/speech and ultra-low power always-on/sensing applications for multiple IoT markets. For connectivity, we offer the industry’s most widely adopted IPs for Bluetooth (Smart and Smart Ready),Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n/ac up to 4×4) and serial storage (SATA and SAS).