Single-Chip Narrow-Band IoT

By SemiWiki

June 6, 2018

Many factors go into building a competitive solution for the IoT, but few are as important for high-volume applications as low cost – not just chip cost but total system cost. If your customers are going to deploy thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of your devices in cities, factories, logistics applications, power grids or homes, products above ~$5 a piece are going to be a very hard sell. I’m not talking here about high-functionality user equipment with high-end sensor fusion, graphics and so on. I’m talking about the little devices that don’t need to do a lot, just a little data-gathering, compute and communication, and should run on a battery for 10+ years.

The trend here is no mobility (eg for parking meters or street lights) or very low mobility, with need to send only a few bytes periodically (how often do you need to be reminded “still working and still no car parked at this meter”?). Battery life is incredibly important; maintenance costs to replace batteries, even annually, could undermine the value of the solution. Compute isn’t going to be a big power factor so low-power communication becomes very important. That’s why the Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) standard was developed – to provide a low-power, low-datarate cellular communication solution.

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