Semtech’s LoRa business never slowed down through the Sierra Wireless acquisition, it says, and it showed the new fruit of its labour last week: a new fourth-generation LoRa Plus chip family, offering multi-protocol support and double the range. LoRa/LoRaWAN is ready for the edge AI era, it says.
In sum – what to know:
IoT innovation – Semtech says its innovation has never let up, despite perceived disruption at group level with Sierra Wireless integration.
IoT integration – new fourth-generation ‘LoRa Plus’ chipsets, ready to ship, bring multi-protocol support, extended range, and single global design.
IoT extension – the LoRa/LoRaWAN market is going beyond meters, sensors, and trackers to support a new range of higher-throughput AI cases.
The LoRa department at Semtech wants to put the record straight: that its side of the house has never stopped, never slowed, never got sidetracked – even through its parent’s expensive acquisition and bumpy integration of cellular IoT business Sierra Wireless over the last two years. It has been business-as-usual, it says – which means constant innovation, it explains. “There was never any disruption on the innovation side,” remarks Robert Comanescu, vice president of marketing and applications in the California firm’s wireless integrated-circuits division.
It is a response to a prompt from RCR Wireless, because the IoT community is a little restless about its recent quiet. “It is full steam ahead,” he says. “Gen-four has been released, as planned. We are working on the next generation – which Hong mentioned in his keynote. So LoRa has never slowed down; we have continued to innovate. Maybe we slowed-down some marketing. That is correct; maybe the perception on the street is that we are not developing because we are not there. But our participation at this show [is constant], and we are ramping up again.”
Some quick context and explanation: Hong is of course Hong Q. Hou, president and chief executive at Semtech, in position for 15 months, since the Sierra integration has been in full swing; ‘generation four’ describes Semtech’s newest family of low-power LoRa chipsets, which bring multi-protocol support and “double” the range; the show, where he (Hou) delivered his keynote (actually more of a fireside chat) is The Things Conference in Amsterdam, last week (September 23-24), the annual LoRa/LoRaWAN shindig hosted by Dutch IoT group The Things Industries.
Hou addressed the sense of quiet, himself, in Amsterdam.
He said: “Last year, the community was a little uncertain about Semtech’s commitment [to] LoRa… because we hit some choppy waters. But we have successfully navigated them, and our financial situation has improved dramatically. We have improved our operational performance… so we are now in position to aggressively invest in core technologies. LoRa is one of those. We have increased R&D investment by 20 percent year-over-year, which is why you are seeing LoRa Plus [now] – and our fifth generation, with a more advanced processing node, very soon.”
We will park the Sierra Wireless piece, and focus on its LoRa segment. The new fourth-generation platform – the flagship “multi-tool” LR 2021 parent-unit in its new LoRa Plus family, described as its “best ever IP for LoRaWAN” – was announced (for product sampling) back in March; but Semtech appears, at least, like it saved news of its full production, slated for “next month” (October), for the Amsterdam event, along with the release of two derivative products, the LR 2022 and LR 2012, for different vertical markets, and further explanation of all the LoRa-plus smarts contained within.
“The new SKUs are built on the LoRa Plus superset family, and take it into specific verticals that have been asking for optimised cost and performance,” explains Shahar Feldman, in charge of product marketing, in conversation with RCR Wireless alongside Comanescu – in a weird bubble tent at The Things Conference. The point about cost/performance is a timely one: its newest LoRa transceiver brings external MCU support for additional protocol stacks, including BLE, Zigbee, Thread, Z-Wave, Amazon Sidewalk, Wireless M-Bus, and Wi-SUN – “and whatever”.
These are on top of its own embedded portfolio, covering LoRa and LoRaWAN in the sub-gigahertz and 2.4 GHz bands, plus its new Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) tech, a physical-layer modulation, newly available at sub-gigahertz, designed for higher data rates (up to 2.6 Mbps in some configurations, they say) than classic LoRa – to serve new AI drone and camera applications. The timeliness is just because The Things Conference is now an extended-family affair, with representation on the stages and show floor from these parallel IoT sectors.
“We did all of this just for the show,” jokes Comanescu.
Multiple modulations
The new top-end LoRa-Plus family, headed by the LR 2021 flagship hardware, rounds out a well-formed LoRa chipset portfolio: otherwise geared for gateways (LoRa Core), sensors (LoRa Connect), and trackers (LoRa Edge). “It’s called LoRa Plus because it’s anchored in LoRa, but it enables so many more protocols,” says Feldman. But it adds any non-LoRa modulation support in an external MCU to make the solution modular and cost effective, he explains. “It is flexible, and it is also very cost-optimized.”
He adds: “You can match the transceiver with any MCU – any sort of memory and interface, for AI processing or not; basically giving OEMs the ability to optimize the MCU selection with the application – for their needs. They can load any kind of home-brew or third-party stack to support any type of low-power wireless or WAN technology.” It does not support orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for cellular or Wi-Fi; it does not support ultra-narrowband (UNB) transmissions with Sigfox, either (in case you’re asking).
But it does support on/off (OOK), frequency-shift (FSK), quadrature phase-shift (QPSK), and gaussian minimum-shift (GMSK) keying, at least – which variously cover these other IoT protocols. QPSK phase-modulation, it might be noted, also brings support for longer-range satellite links, supported for non-terrestrial (NTN) L and S band connectivity on the chip itself – like the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation for LoRa/LoRaWAN and gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) for the company’s higher-throughput FLRC system.
“Long range and low power is the focus,” says Feldman about Semtech’s choices for third-party protocol support; it is the same principle, amped up for new AI cases, with the FLRC innovation. He explains: “Traditionally, the CSS modulation has provided the best spectral efficiency in terms of data rate to sensitivity, versus other IoT protocols.” He has a marketing slide on his laptop with all of the other IoT technologies scattered either side of a Shannon limit curve, purporting to show this measure – of signal-to-noise ratio against spectral efficiency.
The point, he says, is that LoRa operates “way closer than any other protocol” to the Shannon limit, the theoretical foundation for digital comms, which defines the max error-free data rate (capacity) for signal-to-noise ratio – or ‘link budget’ in practical terms. All good, he says; but LoRa is also limited, like any aristocratic LPWAN tech on the IoT scene, to a pulse-like sensor throughput of “tens of kilobytes per second”. “New AI requirements mean sensors are getting smarter – for images or audio clips, or AI models that need to be trained on the downlink side.”
Feldman adds: “Customers have been asking us to support higher data rates. Which is what we’re doing with FLRC, introduced with our second-gen products, but only at 2.4 GHz. They wanted it in the sub-gigahertz range – for longer range and better penetration, to go beyond walls, and into basements and attics. And so that is what we are delivering – up to 2.6 Mbps; like long-range BLE. FLRC performs 8-10 dB better than BLE in terms of link budget so it offers better range or lower power consumption, and better penetration and less infrastructure.”
Double performance
In terms of radio performance, its fourth-generation LoRa setup offers the same kinds of gains over its forebears: a 5–6 dB better link budget versus older gen-two units (the most widely deployed LoRa/LoRaWAN hardware), for example. In free-space conditions (no interference, clear line-of-sight etc), the rule of thumb is that a 6 dB gain means either double the transmission range or a quarter the power usage – which means LoRaWAN now works better for hard-to-reach IoT applications and, by virtue of infrastructure and/or energy savings, more cheaply as well.
Feldman says: “That, by itself, represents a huge improvement and a great innovation. But on top of that, we are also offering a single SKU for the first time to support multiple regions – which means better economies of scale and simpler logistics for customers.” Semtech’s second-generation LoRa units were available as different hardware versions for European and US markets, adapted for different regulatory power limits; its third generation was based on the same chip, but required different peripheral components, ringing-up separate bills of materials (BOMs).
“With this generation, you have the exact same BOM – so a water meter is designed once, and deployed anywhere with the same settings.” The new chipset includes a new power amplifier (PA), too, which can “dynamically scale” from 14 dBm in Europe to 22 dBm in the US, as specified for max power outputs in each region. Which means it doesn’t waste energy when running at lower power in Europe. So then: a single global SKU, comprising one chip and one board design, which means less engineering, less certification, less logistics, less cost, less power.
The LR 2022 and LR 2012, the two new variants announced in Amsterdam, are for the metering (utilities) and tracking (logistics) markets, respectively. Do these fourth-generation units replace older stock – in-market now, when they are upgraded – or do they expand the LoRa/LoRaWAN market to new sectors and applications? “Generation one is still selling,” responds Comanescu. “It might not be growing but it is not reducing massively year over year; it is almost flat. Same with gen-two – it’s growing. It is not a majority, but some like it, and want to keep it.
“If it works, if you don’t have to verify and certify, then some will stick with it. Plus, they are in IoT devices that are deployed for 15 years – so we are not ramping down availability [of older-generation hardware]. But yes, of course, customers will tend to pick the latest-and-greatest with every refresh. And the meter guys, particularly, will appreciate the longer range and the multi-protocol support – so they can get coverage where they couldn’t before, or they can add something else where they can’t, or where they want redundancy. So that’s attractive to them.”
Which will appeal, presumably, for better coordinated smart-home devices, as well, which have tended to come unstuck in a labyrinthine mess of proprietary protocols. “Yes; think of all the door/window sensors out there; you want to add new LoRa devices on top, but you also want to leverage the investments you’ve already made.” The “beauty” of it, says Feldoman, is the protocol stack can be loaded into the MCU at a later stage as a firmware upgrade. The new devices “extend” the LoRa/LoRaWAN market, clarifies Comanescu. “For Semtech, it is definitely incremental.”
Incremental growth
The firm is not trying to compete with rival technologies for legacy contracts, he says. “It is about a Zigbee-plus-LoRa scenario, say – about complimenting that Zigbee use case with a LoRa feature on top.” Semtech’s innovations might be driving marginal performance gains in a marginal business game, but there is a premium attached. “We are not about to compete on price. Our business is a growth-margin business.” It is a telling aside; his boss, Hou, told The Things Conference earlier that Semtech makes 15 percent of its total revenue from LoRa sales and licenses.
Comanescu says: “Yes, and you might consider that to be a small percentage, compared to the revenue of the whole company, but it is one of the fastest growing businesses, and its [bottom-line] contribution is growing as well. It is a highly profitable business.” It is also a business with a massive (indirectly) installed base of “low-power long-range TCO-optimized IoT devices” – numbering over 450 million devices, since its first-generation chips were released in 2013, connected over either proprietary LoRa-based technologies or the global LoRaWAN standard.
Battery-powered water and gas metering is a mainstay application for LoRa/LoRaWAN technology. But it crops up everywhere – in sensors, controls, and alarms in heating and lighting systems, air quality monitors and washroom dispensers, gunshot detectors (“in every school and university in the US”) and parking meters, tracking tags and environmental probes. “All those sensors are driving demand for AI and faster data throughput — and all that infrastructure is prompting questions about what other IoT workloads it can carry,” says Feldman.
Hence the innovation, of course; and hence Semtech’s new work on its next fifth-generation hardware – as discussed by Hou in Amsterdam, and referenced at the top of the piece. So what’s in that, then? Comanescu and Feldman aren’t about to bite, except to say the company is “trying to accelerate” – in line with its business-as-usual ethic, and also with this twin challenge/opportunity about how to load and manage increasing IoT workloads onto expanding IoT infrastructure.
