The HaLoW WiFI booster: Michael De Nil, Morse Micro
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WiFi has dominated the consumer wireless networking market, but in recent years a new standard, 802.11ah, also known as HaLoW, has been extending the packet-based protocol of Wi-Fi into the Internet of Things (IoT) and wide area networking at sub-GHz frequencies.
Morse Micro in Australia has been at the forefront of the technology, showing links of up to 3km in urban areas and as far as 16km in the deserts of the US. The second generation chip and a new online community with open source resources opening up long range communications across a wide range of IoT applications.
The company has just raised AU$88m (US$57m) in a Series C funding round as it ships its second generation system on chip to makers of gateways and USB dongles, opening up a wider range of applications. Japanese chip maker Megachip led the funding round, highlighting the interest in the technology from the Asian region. This brings the total raised by the company to over US$193m for the technology.
“We work closely with Megachip in the production and commercialisation in Japan,” CEO and co-founder Michael De Nil tells eeNews Europe. “We see a significant pull for 802.11ah with promotion council having 200 companies. In Japan there is a lot of industrial automation happening and this is the ideal technology to cover the entire factory floor and connect thousands of device directly into the cloud. Because it is WiFi it connects directly into the cloud, that’s the difference from the other LPWAN technologies.”
The target market is anywhere you would put an ethernet cable, he says, and also points out that the standard supports mesh networking to connect up gateways that use HaLoW as the back haul and LPWAN technologies such as LoraWAN to connect to sensors in the field.
“With HalowLink WiFi4 you can put it anywhere – it shows that HaLoW and LoraWAN are complementary technologies. HaLow is LAN-based technology to connect many things together with decent throughput and often what we see is HaLow often competes with network cabling.
The MM8108 second generation chip that has just started shipping uses 256QAM modulation to achieve higher throughput and integrates a power amplifier (PA) with a 26 dBm, 400 mW output. “We have full control over the RF front end so that the chip can be sold worldwide,” he said. “It’s incredibly hard to build a really good Wi-Fi chip. Building mixed signal RF silicon is a non trivial journey so I would argue the Wi-Fi isn’t a commodity. There’s Qualcomm, Synaptics, Infineon, all racing to WiFi8 with tens of gigabits of connectivity, and 640MHz bandwidth at 6GHz so you see the market going two ways and those chips are getting bigger and more complex each year.”
“From our side we see a lot of room for innovation especially in battery systems, and of course you will pay two or three dollars extra for that.”
A USB reference design, the MM8108-RD09 USB, demonstrates the ease of upgrading new and existing Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7 network infrastructure to support Wi-Fi HaLow. The dongle reference design will be made available to customers as a fully compliant Wi-Fi HaLow reference design, which can be used to build commercial USB dongles or to simplify the integration of the MM8108 silicon in end products, along with a surface mount antenna selected for optimal performance.
The dongle will be bundled with Raspberry Pi 4B, power supply and antenna, and made available as a complete Wi-Fi HaLow evaluation kit (the MM8108-EKH19) targeting customers interested in testing and integrating the MM8108 within their platforms.
“The MM8108-EKH19 is more than just a Wi-Fi HaLow evaluation platform – it’s an enabler of market transformation,” said De Nil. “By simplifying the integration process, we’re making it easier for customers to adopt Wi-Fi HaLow, driving growth and opening doors to new opportunities in IoT and beyond. These solutions position Morse Micro as a leader in a rapidly expanding market, empowering businesses to leverage the full potential of Wi-Fi HaLow for transformative connectivity.”
“For the third generation we are really focussed on the power consumption, reducing it by 37% which is 3 to 4x better than other chip and reducing the sleep current, that’s been a real focus for us. We have integrated USB port
For the second generation SoC the company moved to a standard 22nm silicon process technology at TSMC rather than using the low power silicon on insulator (SOI) process. “We switched process for the second generation and we have been very happy doing that. TSMC has been a fantastic partners and the process has served us really well.”
“We have a design team actively working on the third generation and our RF team is working on its 5th generation design, the silicon is on its 4th generation and the systems and software on the third generation
The focus is how we get the second generation into many more applications,” he said, with a recent deal with Browan Communications to develop an access point using the MM8108 SoC. This will enable 43 Mbit/s throughput at extended range, supporting AI at the edge and intelligent IoT 2.0 applications.
“Collaborations like this will accelerate the adoption of IoT 2.0,” said De Nil. “By combining the performance of our MM8108 chip with Browan’s expertise in wireless access technologies, we’re enabling a new class of connected devices and paving the way for Wi-Fi HaLow to scale across industries and applications.”
It is the increasing bandwidth requirements of cameras and image sensors in the IoT that is driving the demand for 802.11ah, he says.
“We have a set of customers with IP cameras switching to HaLoW and Wi-Sun is adding HaLoW for WLAN connectivity to connect to the home access points and to batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles and chargers.”
In the meantime Morse has worked with a single board computer (SBC) maker in the US to drive industrial automation applications. The VeniceFlex SBC from GateWorks is combined with a PCI M.2 card from Silex with the first generation MM6108 SoC that provides WiFi links up to 1km for wireless sensors, automated mobile robotics, machine health monitoring in smart factories. The SBC can also be used for smart transportation such as train safety systems, fleet management, predictive maintenance as well as smart energy applications such as grid management, solar inverters, wireless EV charging and smart meters.
The SBC and HaLoW module provide a platform for Wi-Fi HaLow evaluation and prototyping for real-world testing with Antenna, JTAG programmer, adapter cables and power supply. Ubuntu Linux runs on the NXP iMX 8M Plus CPU
The launch of the second generation device marks a key step forward for developers, says De Nil. “Over the last year we have opened it up to the wider developer with an online community support with open source and some great projects using Zephyr, FreeRTOS and even Android. This is going to open up to the European developer community,” he said.
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