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A partnership between AzureWave Technologies and Morse Micro has opened up new use cases and quicker time to market for IoT-connected devices based on a new Wi-Fi HaLow module. The solution offers far greater distance and coverage area, as well as lower power energy requirements, leaders of the two companies told EE Times.
“This partnership will bring long-range, low-power Wi-Fi connectivity to a range of IoT devices across the world,” said Michael De Nil, co-founder and CEO of Morse Micro.
AzureWave, a vendor of Wi-Fi modules, and Morse Micro, a vendor of Wi-Fi HaLow chipsets, announced their partnership just this year. Morse Micro’s MM6108 SoC will be at the heart of two of AzureWave’s Wi-Fi HaLow modules, De Nil said.
Wi-Fi HaLow technology has been standardized by an IEEE task group and operates in the unlicensed sub-1 gigahertz frequency band, according to a 2021 informational paper published by the Wi-Fi Alliance. With Wi-Fi HaLow, users can achieve 10× the range, 100× the area and 1,000× the volume of traditional Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi HaLow also allows more than 8,000 connections to a single access point and can go into a sleep mode to save power/extend battery life.
“Think of Wi-Fi that reaches 10 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi, covering entire residential, commercial and industrial properties with a single access point,” De Nil said.
New applications include indoor and outdoor situations where standard Wi-Fi cannot reach, such as battery-operated surveillance systems, wireless cameras and smart home doorbells, according to the white paper.
“Potential applications include smart-home devices, wearables, health-monitoring systems and other IoT devices that require reliable, low-power connectivity,” said Patrick Lin, a product marketing VP at AzureWave. “Wi-Fi HaLow’s ability to penetrate walls makes it good for use in multi-room homes or apartment buildings.”
Other applications to enhance security and health include stadiums, warehouses, offices, shopping malls and industrial buildings. The tech can apply broadly to logistics and asset management, agricultural and environmental sensors, mining, clean energy farms, digital signage and retail stores, the white paper said.
In the past, those seeking the range, low power and penetration of low-frequency Wi-Fi HaLow had to sacrifice speed. Not anymore.
“The key trade-off has been speed versus range,” De Nil said. “When using lower frequencies, and hence narrower bandwidths, wireless speeds are limited to tens of megabits per second. While this is plenty fast for most IoT use cases, traditional Wi-Fi chip vendors have historically focused on faster and faster Wi-Fi. To achieve faster Wi-Fi, higher frequencies are used today (e.g. Wi-Fi 6E supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz). These higher speeds can, however, only be achieved at a very short range, hence making it not ideal for IoT applications. Morse Micro breaks away from the crowd by focusing on building a more reliable, robust Wi-Fi for IoT devices using lower frequencies.”
“We can get up to 32 mb per second—more than twice as fast as any other Wi-Fi HaLow certified solutions out there,” he added. “You can watch Netflix over this on a big TV, connect many live streaming cameras or connect many thousands of low-power devices.”
At one kilometer, the range is up to 10× more than traditional Wi-Fi, De Nil said. In most environments, the module can enable connections up to one kilometer—although that connectivity could reach only to 500 meters in a congested area, such as Las Vegas, or as far as 15 kilometers in, for example, Joshua Tree National Park, he said.
The MM6108 chip also is comparatively small—0-6 mm by 6 mm—and the module is 13 mm by 13 mm, making it easier to integrate, De Nil said. “This module is about half the size of any other on the market.”
AzureWave was looking to create more business opportunities, share knowledge and resources, enhance product innovation, and expand its market share of connectivity modules, Lin said. This partnership will help clients more quickly adopt the emerging technology.
“One of the main challenges with Wi-Fi HaLow is it might take time to gain widespread adoption in the market,” he said. “Our partnership with Morse Micro will leverage their low-power Wi-Fi chips alongside AzureWave’s wireless module expertise. This, in turn, will accelerate the adoption of Wi-Fi HaLow technology by shortening the design cycle, effort and cost involved with early implementations. Our teams have complementary strengths, and by removing duplication of effort we can focus on activities that will deliver market scale.”
Wi-Fi HaLow integrates with the hardware and software developed for traditional WiFi, according to the white paper. Evaluation kits enable potential users to test the technology across a range of applications, De Nil said.
The partnership, with its promise of shorter time to market, will help meet the growing global demand, as well as scale and accelerate Wi-Fi HaLow’s deployment worldwide, he added.
AzureWave will now be able to significantly shorten the time to market for original design manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers who would like to adopt Wi-Fi HaLow as they can integrate AzureWave’s Wi-Fi HaLow modules into their design, instead of requiring a more complicated chip-down design, De Nil said.
Higher demands for long-range connectivity and lower power requirements for many IoT and machine-to-machine applications are, in turn, building demand for Wi-Fi HaLow, the white paper said.
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