Lowest power Wi-Fi chip for IoT

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Innophase has launched a single chip multiprotocol transceiver for the Internet of Things (IoT) with what the company claims is the industry's lowest power consumption.

The Talaria TWO platform combines the transceiver, MAC/PHY, digital power amplifier and an embedded ARM processor for battery-based IoT applications. Operating with a Delivery Traffic Indication Map (DTIM) every third frame (DTIM3), the chip uses half the power of the leading low power Wi-Fi chips, says the company. 

The chip actively manages multiprotocol coexistence for 802.11b/g/n WiFi and BLE 5.0 for demanding edge-of-network applications. Initial customer products developed using the Talaria TWO wireless platform have shown battery life improvements of more than 50% versus competitive solutions.

“Power consumption has typically limited the potential of battery-powered, wirelessly connected products. The frequency of battery changes can be a hassle to consumers, a prohibitive cost to service-oriented companies, and something product OEMs are increasingly cautious of,” said Phil Solis, research director at IDC. “Innovative, low-power wireless connectivity designs, such as those from InnoPhase, are increasingly sought for new and better product designs, opening the door to a wider range of battery-powered IoT products – an increasingly larger portion of the approximately 4 billion Wi-Fi-enabled products that now ship each year.”

The Talaria TWO platform uses InnoPhase’s PolaRFusion radio architecture, which processes radio signals using polar coordinates rather than traditional IQ coordinates. This digitally-intensive radio solution dramatically reduces the amount of power required to transmit, process, and receive wireless information using industry standard wireless protocols. It achieves this by moving most of the radio signal processing from power-hungry analogue circuits, found in today’s IQ-architecture wireless solutions, into power and size efficient digital logic.

“We selected InnoPhase’s Talaria TWO wireless solution for our new market-leading battery-powered camera platform for use in consumer monitoring and commercial security,” said Ben Bodley, CEO of Teknique, a partner with camera chip designer Ambarella. “The choice was clear given Talaria TWO’s ability to maintain Wi-Fi connectivity at extremely low 2 power levels and eliminating the need for a wireless hub. In addition, it greatly extended our product’s battery life, lowered the overall system cost and delivered a better user experience.”

Customers are now sampling the extreme low power Talaria TWO wireless platform with full commercial availability and certification slated for mid-2019.

innophaseinc.com