As the smartphone market matures, companies that make mobile device components are looking to the internet of things for growth opportunities. Korea’s Wisol, which makes surface acoustic wave filters and duplexers for phones, will now make machine-to-machine connectivity modules based on Sequans’ LTE chipsets.
“Wisol has a strong track record in designing and building RF components and the combination of their and our technologies in these new LTE for IoT modules will enable optimizations in power, size and cost that we believe will accelerate growth in LTE for IoT worldwide,” said Danny Kedar, VP of Sequans’ IoT business unit.
Wisol will use Sequans’ Category M1, Category 1 and Category 4 LTE chipsets. Higher categories of LTE support more bandwidth, but companies that want to connect equipment to the internet are often looking for very low bandwidth solutions because they want inexpensive modules and modems. Sequans CEO Georges Karam has said his company’s Cat M1 solution can support modules priced at less than $10 each.
IoT modules are solutions that combine connectivity chips with other chips that add functionality, like graphics processing or sensor capabilities. According to Sequans, many of its module partners are creating solutions for a specific vertical market. Sequans’ module partners include Huawei, Foxconn, Gemalto, USI, WNC, SIMCom, Fibocom, and now Wisol.
Sequans’ Cat M1 chips comprise baseband, RF, power management, and RAM, and include RF filtering technology that is meant to enable a global SKU with multi-band support within a single hardware design. They also support narrowband IoT, a new technology that is not part of the LTE specification and is expected to require carrier hardware upgrades for those that want to use it.
