News: Microelectronics
6 January 2020
Skyworks powering 5G Massive IoT applications
Skyworks Solutions Inc of Woburn, MA, USA (which manufactures analog and mixed-signal semiconductors) says that its family of connectivity modules are powering the rapidly emerging 5G Massive Internet of Things (Massive IoT) market. Specifically, the firm’s turnkey engines provide the critical wireless functionality that is becoming essential for the billions of devices, objects and machines across an increasingly connected world.
IoT manufacturers are quickly embracing cellular connectivity, given its ability to deliver a secure, real-time device-to-cloud connection needed for remote monitoring, control or management. This low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) capability is suitable for widely adopted consumer products such as smartwatches, wearables and asset trackers, as well as industrial and infrastructure applications such as gas, water and electric metering, machine monitoring, factory automation, supply chain and logistics oversight.
“With the emergence of 5G, IoT devices utilizing Skyworks’ carrier-certified solutions will go to market faster and be more cost-effective than implementing discrete architectures,” says John O’Neill, VP of marketing. “Skyworks has established itself as a leader in developing breakthrough 5G platforms for mobile and has now combined this expertise with market-leading modem technology to provide extremely power-efficient and unmatched integration for IoT innovations globally,” he claims.
According to a recent 5G Americas white paper, in parallel to the 5G rollout, cellular IoT (i.e. Massive IoT) is becoming the technology of choice for wide-area IoT applications. In a 2019 Mobility Report from Ericsson, cellular-connected IoT devices are predicted to grow from 1 billion units in 2018 to 4.1 billion units by 2024, representing a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27%. As a subset, LTE-M/NB-IoT (Massive IoT) is expected to represent 45% of this figure, or about 2 billion connections (up from less than 10 million in 2018).
Skyworks’ claims that the flagship SKY66430-11 is the smallest, fully certified all-in-one device and incorporates a multi-band, multi-chip system-in-package (SiP) enabling cellular LTE-M/NB-IoT (half-duplex FDD) architectures. Integrating Sequans’ MONARCH SQN3330 chip provides an entire RF front-end (RFFE), transceiver, power management, memory and baseband modem for an LTE multiband radio operating in the 700-2200MHz frequency range.
Skyworks says that its SiP has been certified by leading worldwide carriers including KDDI, NTT Docomo, SoftBank and Verizon. Early adopters of Skyworks’ Massive IoT portfolio include Pebblebee, Daatrics and GeoTraq.
Other products from Skyworks’ Massive IoT portfolio include the SKY68020-11, SKY68001-31, SKY68001-41, SKY68018-11 and SKY77368-11 multi-band RFFE modules supporting up to Power Class 3 (+23dBm) half-duplex transceiver platforms. These solutions are designed for global 5G Massive IoT network deployments in low-band and mid-band frequencies in addition to providing 2G backward compatibility, either natively or through auxiliary ports. These 5G-ready devices work in tandem with all major LTE-M/NB-IoT modems and are currently available.
At the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Skyworks is hosting customer meetings and demonstrating its SKY66430 by appointment at the Sands Expo (7-10 January).
