Electronics Enthusiast Network report (wen/Cheng Wenzhi) mentioned that Semtech is the most likely to think of their LoRa products, technologies and solutions. LoRa technology is unique and truly popular in the IoT market. As of December 2021, more than 2.7 million LoRa-based gateways have been deployed worldwide, and more than 225 million LoRa-based endpoints have been deployed. LoRa or LoRaWAN is deployed in 171 countries and regions.
Rooted in China for 20 years, it will continue to increase investment in the Chinese market in the future
Semtech entered China in 2001 and has been rooted in the Chinese market for more than 20 years with an office in Shanghai. Today, its sales, technical support, and R&D teams are located in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Xi'an, Suzhou, Wuhan and other cities.
Photo: Zhang Hui, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Sales, Asia Pacific, Semtech
Zhang Hui told the media that Semtech relies on the world's leading innovative technology, high performance and high reliability products, strong local support, complete and flexible supply chain, strong delivery capabilities, flexible to meet the diversified needs of customers, help Chinese customers improve product competitiveness, so that products can be launched quickly.
He also revealed that Semtech has established long-term and in-depth cooperative relations with many domestic head customers, including China Telecom, BYD, Ali, Tencent, Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, Lenovo and so on.
"We are very focused on working with our customers to help the industry ecosystem grow and promote the prosperity of the local ecosystem. Because win-win is one of the basic requirements of our company culture, we are committed to creating a win-win situation with ecological partners in software, hardware and solutions, and expanding the market together to succeed. Zhang Hui stressed.
In Zhang Hui's view, the Chinese market is the largest market for Semtech, and the Chinese electronics industry market is the fastest growing market in the world. Therefore, Semtech will develop special strategies and products for the needs of the Chinese market, and will continue to increase its investment in the Chinese market every year.
Three key layout market innovative products
As mentioned earlier, Semtech focuses on three major markets, and in 2021, Semtech has launched corresponding innovative products for these three major markets, such as in the data center market, Semtech launched a low-power solution for optical communication connectivity - Tri-Edge PAM4 CDR; the consumer market launched a PerSe series of sensors for the consumer smart device market; in the Internet of Things market, LoRa technology has been further developed.
Tri-Edge PAM4 CDR, a low-power solution for optical communication connectivity
According to Xudong Huang, vice president of sales at Semtech China, the Tri-Edge PAM4 CDR chipset is based on analog technology, and its solution can replace the existing DSP solution. "Analog technology is relatively simple at many levels, but it has very big challenges for architecture, design, and simulation design." He confessed.
Photo: Xudong Huang, Vice President of Sales at Semtech China
The Tri-Edge PAM4 CDR chipsets GN2538 and GN2539 are in full volume production in 2021. The GN2538 is a dual 50G PAM4 CDR with an integrated VCSEL driver that enables a wide selection of VCSELs, with fully adaptive input equalization and easy start-up, simplifying system setup, while the GN2539 is a dual 50G PAM4 CDR with an integrated linear transimpedance amplifier (TIA) that provides excellent receiver performance and reliable adaptability, and includes configurable output de-emphasis. This enables robust and compatible electrical interfaces. According to Huang Xudong, some customers have made the product into modules and shipped them to data center customers.
When it comes to the advantages of Tri-Edge PAM4 CDR products, Huang Xudong believes that there are three main points, namely low power consumption, low cost and low latency. "Because we don't need the latest DSP process and only use the analog RF process, it is relatively cost-competitive, and because we use analog technology, there is no digital transformation and algorithm, so its latency is also ultra-low." And these points are very important for data centers. ”
That said, the analog PAM4 GN2538 and GN2539 chipsets provide a level of integration that reduces costs, delivering ideal low power and low latency performance for high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud data center networking. Moreover, the chipset is also fully compliant with the Open Eye MSA standard for 50G multimode fiber per channel.
PerSe series sensors
PerSe technology is based on Semtech's more than a decade of experience in sensor technology, which is tailored for a wide range of consumer smart devices. It can automatically sense the presence of the human body and trigger intelligent response in time, bringing the ultimate user experience while complying with SAR regulations.
According to Huang Xudong, Semtech has launched a series of products for SAR regulations, and is now the third generation of PerSe. He believes that as the concept of a "metacosmum" is widely discussed, PerSe will also contribute to the development of the consumer market for wearable devices such as VR smart glasses.
The PerSe portfolio includes three core product families: PerSe Connect, PerSe Connect Pro, and PerSe Control. The three products have different performance, and the AI algorithm is also different, and they all have their own unique sensing technology. Among them, PerSe Connect and PerSe Control have been launched for two or three years, and PerSe Connect Pro is the latest product launched.
- PerSe Connect: Enhanced connectivity for many smartphones and laptops around the world (5G Sub-6, 4G, and Wi-Fi). These sensors help optimize RF power for optimal connectivity performance, providing a fast wireless experience while maintaining SAR compliance.
- PerSe Connect Pro: The first sensor to deliver ultra-high sensing performance for high-band 5G mmWave devices in smartphones, laptops and tablets. These sensors enable higher sensing distances to safely manage increased RF exposures.
- PerSe Control: Enables smarter control in wearables to improve the user experience. This series of sensors enables human detection, automatic switching on and off, and start/stop response. It also offers state-of-the-art gesture control and responsiveness, including smart assistant, noise reduction activation, and media player control.
The latest developments in LoRa
Semtech's main technology in the field of Internet of Things is LoRa. According to Huang Xudong, in 2021, LoRa has also made satisfactory progress and results. "LoRa is now a very mature Internet of Things technology, coupled with its self-organizing, safe and controllable application characteristics, making LoRa very suitable for the current Internet of Things networking scenarios and needs, therefore, not only in China, but also in the world, LoRa has a very perfect ecosystem."
Semtech's application development team in China has developed and released a complete LoRa private protocol networking solution for the Chinese market, which is provided to LoRa ecological partners free of charge to support everyone to do a good job in the project and land faster. Huang Xudong revealed that the number of domestic LoRa industry chain enterprises has exceeded 3,000. That is to say, LoRa has more than 3,000 ecological partners in China, which are distributed in the fields of smart buildings/buildings, industrial parks, asset tracking, power and energy management, metering, fire protection and security, smart agriculture and animal husbandry management, epidemic prevention and control and medical health.
In terms of the progress of LoRa deployment around the world, as of December 2021, more than 2.7 million LoRa-based gateways and more than 225 million LoRa-based endpoints have been deployed worldwide. LoRa or LoRaWAN is deployed in 171 countries and regions. It is expected that by 2026, 50% of LPWAN IoT solutions will use LoRa solutions. The LoRa Alliance is working with major IoT ecosystems around the world to drive the expansion of LoRa market adoptions. The LoRa Alliance currently has more than 400 corporate members, including several heavyweight software companies and satellite communications service providers.
From the perspective of LoRa global market and application, Semtech released the LoRa Edge ultra-low-power positioning solution and the supporting LR110 chip in 2020, which is used in logistics and asset management, and many customers around the world have already commercialized the solution. For satellite communications, in 2021, the LoRa Alliance released a protocol that supports LR-FHSS capabilities. There are currently 163 LoRaWAN operators worldwide, a triple increase in three years.
In addition, Amazon in the United States released the Sidewalk networking protocol, which also accelerated the application of LoRa in the smart home market. In December 2021, LoRaWAN was approved as an ITU international standard and LoRaWAN has become a true global standard for LPWAN.
In terms of the domestic market, LoRa has developed rapidly in many areas this year, such as the continuous growth of the water and gas meter market; in the new Internet of Things vertical market, such as power grid, fire and security, smart factory, smart building, smart agriculture and other fields have grown exponentially.
It is worth mentioning that Semtech cooperated with Tencent Cloud to officially integrate the LoRa Edge geolocation service. There are so many location services, how is LoRa location services different?
Gan Quan, Director of Market Strategy for LoRa in Semtech China, explained that due to the fragmentation and differentiation of the Internet of Things, many IoT applications require better battery life, lower costs, and more flexible operating models, so they need different positioning technologies. Generally speaking, Wi-Fi positioning is mainly indoors, GNSS positioning is mainly outdoor, and LoRa Edge geolocation scheme can support both indoor and outdoor.
In terms of positioning accuracy, LoRa Edge is mainly aimed at positioning 10-50 meters to meet the needs of a large number of Internet of Things applications. LoRa Edge is a long-lived, low-cost, wide-coverage, medium-precision geolocation system with IoT DNA. According to Ganquan, the complete set of cloud services used by LoRa Edge not only has the function of cloud processing, but also the function of cloud positioning.
In terms of application scenarios, Ganquan believes that the most suitable application scenarios for LoRa Edge include industrial park asset tracking, cold chain monitoring, shared bicycle tracking, cattle and sheep livestock monitoring, etc. The frequency of positioning of these scenes is basically in the hourly level, and the accuracy of positioning is not high, 10 meters or 50 meters of positioning accuracy. For example, there is a cow and sheep on the ranch that has walked away, the pasture is endless, you only need to look at the approximate position of the cattle and sheep in the background, even if the error is 10 meters, 20 meters, you can definitely find it. For example, in the case of cold chain monitoring in the park, the cold chain car is very large, even if there is a 20-meter error, the impact is not large. And the frequency requirements for positioning in this scenario are not very high, so that the power consumption of the entire system has been greatly improved, and the battery life of the entire device can range from a few days to several months or even to one or two years.
LoRa Edge's system has a hardware part and a software part, the hardware part uses the basic chip provided by LoRa Semtech supported by LoRa Edge - LR1110, and then with an MCU to do the corresponding processing, of course, you can also directly use LR1110 as a simple tracking application; the software part is provided by LoRa Cloud. LoRa Cloud has two parts of the function, one part of the function is to provide geographical positioning processor, LoRa Edge is the most important positioning, it is the indoor and outdoor positioning through the cloud computing calculation. This is low power consumption and easy to manage. The other part of LoRa Cloud's services is about data management, data services, debug demodulators, and features as part of a SaaS solution.
As part of the LoRa Edge geolocation platform, LoRa Cloud has now been officially integrated into the Tencent Cloud IoT Development Platform, which supports users in China to quickly connect LoRa Edge-based IoT devices to the cloud, and combines Tencent Maps' high-trust and high-coverage Wi-Fi positioning capabilities to provide Chinese enterprises and developers with flexible, low-power, and cost-effective geolocation service solutions.
In terms of cloud application construction, users have two ways to choose, one is to develop through open source and third-party components; the other is through a direct cloud platform, such as Tencent Cloud in China, and AWS in foreign countries.
According to Xia Yunfei, product architect of Tencent Cloud Internet of Things, Tencent Cloud IoT location services have supported diversified indoor and outdoor positioning capabilities, and can be combined with Tencent Lianlian Mini Program to provide users with a light and fast experience.