Skyworks Solutions were on hand at electronica to talk through their solutions for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communications, smart city applications and products in the 2.4GHz range, as IoT Insider spoke to Tom Valencia, Senior Product Marketing Manager and Steve Belletete, Applications Director at their stand.
Vehicle communications
One such solution on show was the SKY5A2105, a 5.9GHz front-end module (FEM) for C-V2X and LTE communications.
“V2X has been going on for a while,” Valencia explained, “it’s challenging you to improve safety.” This kind of safety can be achieved by enabling communications between vehicles, or between vehicles and the network, vehicles to pedestrians, and so on.
“In a vehicle to vehicle situation they can talk to one another and tell one another, there’s an accident or a pedestrian coming along, so you might want to slow down. So the cars will automatically slow down.”
The module was developed in collaboration with Autotalks, who made the transceiver. Cognisant of the fact that C-2VX communications rely on cellular networks to work, Skyworks has also added coexistence filters to prevent disruption from other signals.
WI-SUN smart city applications
In the smart city area Skyworks were showcasing their SKY66122-11 FEM for Wi-SUN applications.
One reason Wi-SUN was chosen was because of the sub-gigahertz range in which they operate, Belletete explained. “It’s in a sub-gigahertz range, 863 to 928, and there are different bands for us and for Europe,” he said. “It travels through walls and floors better than higher frequencies and it is in the ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) band so there is spectrum that’s available. That’s one of the reasons.”
Balletete noted that due to the expansion of IoT infrastructure more generally, Skyworks was able to introduce its SKY66425-11, a dual-mode LTE and ISM FEM. “Next Entry meters is one of the customers that’s using it [the module],” he explained, “it combines both the high-power output signal from Wi-SUN but also includes a pass through for LTE.”
This means the module has two radios but a single antenna. “You could have Wi-SUN transmitting through the single antenna, for example, or LTE passing through the front end module and out of the same antenna,” he detailed.
However, a single antenna isn’t always the best option depending on the use case, and having two antennas can safeguard against one antenna becoming blocked or failing to get signal, for example, “perhaps where the water meter is down in the basement,” said Belletete. “If it’s in the basement and you don’t have a good signal , you could perhaps switch to a second antenna that’s routed through a cable to the outside. That would be a case for diversity antennas.”
“There are also cases where you may have multiple radios packed closely together from a single supplier because they may have a water meter, or a gas meter,” he continued, “that can lead to some challenges as well. This year we’ve developed a suite of new products that include coexistence filters that we manufacture to filter out those coexistence signals.”
When asked if he thought coexistence was becoming a greater concern as the number of IoT devices are projected to be in the billions, Belletete regarded it as an “engineering challenge that needs to be solved. From an engineering standpoint it’s solvable, and it’s an opportunity for us to showcase what we can do and how we can integrate filters into our own modules so it improves the signal receiver sensitivity.”
2.4GHZ range
Skyworks also were exhibiting at their booth products that had been developed using their module in the 2.4GHz range, which included a Bluetooth hearing aid device where the hearing aid could be connected to a smartphone to turn it on and off through a Bluetooth connection.
The hearing aid itself was quite small and was a notable technical challenge for Skyworks, who had to develop a small form factor chip scale package that could be directly on the board for the hearing aid.
The limited space also presented another challenge, which was the battery. “There’s not a lot of space for a large battery, so one of the key parameters that we are shooting for is high efficiency. So we’re developing some new products that are targeting a wider battery range so that as the battery drains you are able to maintain your output power and target a 40% efficiency.”
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