Low power multi-protocol wireless Wi-Fi SoC targets IoT
The industry’s lowest power Wi-Fi radio, Talaria TWO includes InnoPhase’s advanced, patented PolaRFusion™radio – a complete 2.4 GHz radio built using an innovative polar architecture that enables extreme low power and programmable functionality. The SoC includes an ArmCortex-M3 processor, memory, RF, baseband, PHY, and MAC functionality integrated into a small, single-chip design. The chip initially supports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 5.0) standard.
Talaria TWO has also received a coveted CES 2020 Innovation Award Honoree in the embedded product category.
The wireless connectivity market valued at $44.34 billion in 2017 is expected to grow to $95.66 billion by 2023 and we anticipate accelerating that growth with a platform that offers two to eight times more Wi-Fi battery power than the competition,” said Yang Xu, CEO of InnoPhase.
Current wireless signal processing architectures were developed long before the need for battery-based wireless devices were conceived. Battery-based “edge-of-the network” IoT products will now be able to go many months or years between battery changes. InnoPhase technology enables an entirely new category of high volume, battery-powered consumer, commercial, medical and industrial applications with its low power Wi-Fi design. Customers using the Talaria TWO wireless platform are experiencing a doubling or more of their product battery life.
An evaluation kit (EVK) for the Talaria TWO platform includes everything needed for evaluating the product’s performance plus preliminary product integration and development. InnoPhase has also incorporated the Talaria TWO device into a solder-down module form-factor to help customers accelerate their time to market. The module will be the vehicle used by InnoPhase for industry certifications and agency approval and the design information can be shared with interested customers.
The technology – PolaRFusion
InnoPhase was founded on the premise of creating a totally new, extremely efficient and digitally-dominant radio architecture that would finally enable wireless systems to take full advantage of the significant low power, size, integration and cost advantages that advanced semiconductor process technology bring to the market. To this end, the company has succeeded in moving semiconductor radio signal processing from a predominantly power-hungry analog solution into highly efficient, extremely low power digital circuits.
InnoPhase has coined the term “PolaRFusion” to describe this major advance in the way RF signals are processed in the radio. The key InnoPhase differentiator is how the RF waveform is encoded and decoded using polar coordinates, amplitude and phase, in place of traditional Cartesian/IQ coordinates, in-phase and quadrature, that are used in traditional analog-based radios.
To maximize energy efficiency, InnoPhase has developed a purpose-built, low power “polar coordinate processing” architecture with an optimized instruction set based on advanced nonlinear mathematics for manipulating these now digitally-represented polar coordinates. In addition, as the radio signal travels through the PolaRFusion transceiver it can now be accurately processed using software algorithms. Entire portions of the radio hardware that used to be dominated by analog processing have been moved into digital circuits. The unique and patented flexLNA (flexible low noise amplifier) and DPA (digital power amplifier) are also implemented in digital CMOS circuits and major portions of the RF signal is processed using flexible, programmable software algorithms.
Overall radio power reductions associated with using the digital PolaRFusion architecture are startling. For example, compared to the lowest power Wi-Fi wireless IQ architecture solutions in use in the market today, batteries in low power IoT applications last 2X to 8X longer. InnoPhase designed radios using the PolaRFusion architecture drastically reduces analog circuit power consumption by up to 65% compared to the lowest power IQ radios in use in the market today.