Using Bluetooth for positioning is a topic I have touched on before, for location services, keyless entry, and asset tracking among other applications. Earlier implementations depended on measures of received signal strength and angle-of-arrival / angle-of-departure, but these have limited accuracy in environments with… Read More
There have always been good reasons to port designs to new foundries or processes. These reasons have included reusing IP in new projects, moving an entire design to a smaller node to improve PPA, or second sourcing manufacturing. While there can be many potential business motivations for any of the above, in today’s environment… Read More
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon is mostly a small battery powered radio transmitter that sends Bluetooth advertising packets containing information like URL (Universal Resource Locator), UUID (Universal Unique Identifier), battery voltage, temperature, transmit power at regular intervals to the mobile or fixed devices.… Read More
When thinking about positioning you probably first think of navigation. The device in your car that helps get from where you are to where you want to be. Or navigating while hiking in the backcountry. But those applications are not the where the big unit growth will come. The biggest demand will be in asset tracking, expected to reach… Read More
When we think of wireless it is natural to wonder “which one – cellular, Wi-Fi, BLE?” Our phones support everything but those are pricey devices. What if we wanted the same combo wireless option in a low-cost IoT device, maybe something that only need to send a small amount of data periodically? Logistics applications are a good example.… Read More
It isn’t hard to understand the advantage of mesh networking (in wireless networks). Unlike star/tree configurations in which end-points connect to a nearby hub (such as phones connecting to a conventional wireless access point), in a mesh nodes can connect to nearest neighbors, which can connect to their nearest neighbors… Read More
Innovation in smart homes, smart buildings, smart factories and many other contexts differentiates in sensing, in some cases actuation, implementation certainly (low power for example) and rolling up data to the cloud. It isn’t in the on-board CPU and I doubt any of those entrepreneurs want to create their own Bluetooth or Wi-Fi… Read More
Dolphin is addressing the ultra-low-power (ULP) needs for some applications, like for example Bluetooth low energy (BLE), machine-to-machine (M2M) or IoT edge devices in general. For these applications, defining active and sleep modes is imperative, but it may not be enough to guarantee that the battery-powered system will… Read More
If we agree on the definition of IoT as a distributed set of services based on sensing, sharing and controlling through new nodes, we realize that these nodes are a big hardware opportunity. The chip makers and IP vendors have to create innovative SoC, delivering high performance at low cost and low energy. Moreover, the new systems… Read More
Bluetooth (BT) was never a bit-player in communication but what surprised me is that is already dominating the market, at least as measured by radios sold, and is likely to extend that lead over the next 5 years. Particularly impressive is that BT already leads cellular and WiFi. This strength is certainly influenced by sales into… Read More
