At present, it may be said that it is the golden age of low-power wide area network (LPWAN), but although LoRa and Sigfix seem to occupy the dominant position in the LPWAN market, supporters of the cellular Internet of Things (IoT) still believe that they can reverse the situation.
3GPP completed the NB-IoT standardization of narrowband radio technology for IoT applications in June last year, providing semiconductors and IP providers with a great opportunity to showcase relevant technologies at this year's World Mobile Communications Conference (MWC 2017). Including ARM, Sequans CommunicaTIons, Altair Semiconductors, now owned by Sony, and Qualcomm have solutions.
Market research firm IHS Markit foresees that the deployment of NB-IoT technology in 2017 will be an "inflecTIon point" in the LPWAN market; the agency M2M and IoT market senior analyst Sam Lucero will be interviewed by EE TImes It is said that NB-IoT is expected to achieve higher growth rate than the popular technologies in the LPWAN market, Sigfox and LoRa, because the latter two are basically proprietary technologies, but the former is the 3GPP standard: "has a strong 3GPP mobile communication ecosystem. The system is backed up and is the advantage of NB-IoT."
ARM also seems to be preparing to grab the NB-IoT boom; the company just announced the acquisition of two companies with rich experience in cellular communication standards, Mistbase and NextG-Com; ARM accepted the interview with EE TImes pointed out that the two The company has been working with ARM for some time, so it is time to check the results of their products operating on the ARM architecture.
According to ARM, Mitbase provides NB-IoT physical layer implementation, and NextG-Com provides complete NB-IoT Layer 2 and Layer 3 software stacks; the two teams are collaborating to launch integrated solutions, and ARM has shown The NB-IoT market's key IP suppliers are looking forward to helping ARM camp partners accelerate the development of NB-IoT standard chips.
Lucero believes that ARM's actions are predictable. He observed that the mobile communications ecosystem faces the fact that the mobile phone market is mature in developed countries. Most of them have regarded the Internet of Things as a key growth opportunity: "NB-IoT is a 3GPP ecosystem. The manufacturers have mastered the important results of the IoT business opportunities."
ARM's entry into the NB-IoT market is probably not good news for the cellular IoT chip suppliers such as Sequans and Atair; however, Lucero believes that the addition of ARM will increase the market competition and stimulate product price cuts. Other benefits are the ability to bring highly integrated solutions to the NB-IoT chip market, reducing design complexity and overall cost for IoT device developers.
He said that the ARM ecosystem includes thousands of software developers with extensive experience in ARM architecture technology development: "This will help reduce risks for developers and shorten time-to-market;" but the NB-IoT chip market The war has just begun, although ARM feels raging: "It is important to note that there are not only ARM-based NB-IoT chips on the market today, so Sequans and Atair definitely have time to continue to expand the layout and come up with a response strategy."
Indeed, ARM said that the IP platform that can be licensed to ARM's leading partners will not be available until the end of the fourth quarter of 2017. The first products are expected to be available by 2018.
"Integrated solution" is the focus of competitionAgainst the competition, Sequans' strategy is to develop a highly integrated NB-IoT system single-chip (SoC); the company's CEO, Georges Karam, said that the first round of competition in the IoT market is better than who can provide the slimmest module. The second round of competition is expected to shrink the entire IoT solution into a single chip.
Sequan's new SoC solution Monarch SX integrates the Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT platform released a year ago with the low-power ARM Cortex-M4 processor, low-power sensor hub, image display controller and multimedia processing engine Karam said that Monarch SX provides a "one-stop" solution for IoT product developers, including wearable devices, and saves time in finding the various components.
In addition to Sequen, IHS Markit's Lucero said that Intel released two chips in February last year, including the XMM 7115 Cat-NB1 modem and the XMM 7315 modem/application processor single chip, all supporting the Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 standards. Qualcomm announced the MDM9206 Cat-M1/NB1 modem chip last fall. It seems that Sequan's footsteps do have a lead, but it is only a matter of time before Qualcomm launches an integrated solution.
Altair also plans to launch the first CAT-1/NB1 chip ALT1250 at MWC; according to Eran Eshed, co-founder and vice president of global business and marketing, the chip includes a component of a cellular IoT module. For example, RF, fundamental frequency, front-end components, power amplifiers, filters and switches, etc., will also be equipped with GPS transceivers.
It is still too early to predict the impact of ARM's participation in the competition. It is very clear that the impact of Sequans and Altair will be too early, but one thing that is clear is that by 2018, IoT system suppliers intending to adopt NB-IoT technology will There are many options to choose from; IHS Markit predicts that the NB-IoT market is expected to reach 1 million links in 2017, and the number will increase to 141 million by 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 240%, with LPWAN The court resisted.
Compilation: Judith Cheng
(Reference: Cellular IoT Chip Battle Escalates at MWC, by Junko Yoshida)
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