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DecaWave preps for expansion, next location chip.

DecaWave preps for expansion, next location chip.

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By eeNews Europe



DecaWave develops RF transceivers for indoor location and communication based on pulsed UWB wireless. In June the company announced it had closed a funding round from "Angel" investors that brought its total funding since its formation in 2004 to $30 million. "We raised $4 million in second quarter of 2015 from angel investors but the plan is to raise another $10 million to $20 million," Mickael Viot, marketing manager of DecaWave, told eeNews Europe.

This additional funding would be used to create multiple chip design teams working in parallel and to address application-specific versions of its generic micro-location technology, said Viot.

DecaWave’s first chip, the ScenSor DW1000, is a CMOS ultra-wideband RF transceiver IC based on the IEEE 802.15.4a standard that supports data rates of 110-kbps, 850-kbps, 6.8-Mbps, and 27-Mbps. It is manufactured for DecaWave by TSMC in 90nm CMOS and 6mm by 6mm QFN package. It operates at frequencies in the range 3.5GHz to 10GHz and provides an accuracy of +/-10cm and peak current consumption of about 120mA, said Viot.

The company announced the ScenSor back in 2009. It took until 2013 to get the part in production, said Viot. However, since November 2013 DecaWave has sent out more than 1,000 evaluation kits, 7,500 location modules based on the chip and 300,000 chips to more than 250 customers.

Such chips can be used in beacons and objects and when multiple distances are measured from beacons with known locations that can be used to triangulate an object’s position. The application space is large including locating and tracking people and their objects and collision avoidance of drones, and robots in factories. Potential applications also abound in agriculture, smart cities and smart homes.

Viot reckons DecaWave is well placed to help drive – and benefit from – an imminent revolution in micro-location applications where billions of objects will be embedded with UWB transceivers to enable security and to provide additional functionality. An example is a design win Decawave has in an automobile key fob to provide an additional layer of security by only allowing a radio source that is close, to open the vehicle. This is scheduled to appear in 2017 although Viot declined to name the automobile maker.

Low-cost ZigBee and Bluetooth LE chips are being used for location applications but these protocols are designed for data streaming not for location, said Viot. "So with narrowband RF and say 20MHz of bandwidth you end up with less accuracy. The raw data gives 15 to 20 meters of accuracy and then you have to do a lot of filtering and averaging of that data to get below that." That becomes a power inefficient approach and in any case for many Internet of Things applications and wireless sensor nodes significant digital computer power may not be available, added Viot.

Next: Goals for next chip


The goal for DecaWave’s next chip is to reduce peak power and cost. The peak power consumption on the current chip is 120mA. Because the usage is pulsed the average power consumption depends on the application and pulsing frequency. The power consumption can also be tailored to the range required. "Halving it [on the new chip] would be a good result," said Viot.

"We don’t need further funding to operate at the pace we’re operating at today. But we are getting strong traction in consumer applications and they are asking for ASSPs [application specific standard products]. Right now we have one R&D flow. So a reason for further funding would be maybe to have three R&D flows that can design chips in parallel," Viot said

DecaWave does face competition from such startup companies as Blinksight SA (Colombelles, France) and BeSpoon SAS (Le Bourget du Lac, France) and this may provide reasons for DecaWave wishing to accelerate its pace of engagement.

Related links and articles:

www.decawave.com

www.blinksight.com

www.bespoon.com

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