New Industry Products

Single-Chip Wireless IoT Solution Improves Battery Life by Over 50%

February 25, 2019 by Scott McMahan

InnoPhase announced the Talaria TWO platform, a complete wireless IoT solution integrated into a single chip. The platform contains a full functionality multiprotocol transceiver, MAC/PHY, digital power amplifier, and an embedded ARM processor for lightweight applications. InnoPhase designed the Talaria TWO chip for battery-based IoT applications that require an extremely low-power Wi-Fi solution. The company has also introduced an evaluation kit for the Talaria TWO platform. (See image above).

The company asserts that the technology has the potential to create a new class of IoT products that can cut the power cord and be battery-based with a DTIM 3 specification at least half that of leading low-power Wi-Fi solutions.

"Power consumption has typically limited the potential of battery-powered, wirelessly connected products. The frequency of battery changes can be a hassle to consumers, a prohibitive cost to service-oriented companies, and something product OEMs are increasingly cautious of," said Phil Solis, research director at IDC. "Innovative, low-power wireless connectivity designs, such as those from InnoPhase, are increasingly sought for new and better product designs, opening the door to a wider range of battery-powered IoT products - an increasingly larger portion of the approximately 4 billion Wi-Fi-enabled products that now ship each year."

The Talaria TWO platform uses InnoPhase's patented PolaRFusionTM radio architecture, which processes radio signals using polar coordinates rather than traditional IQ coordinates. PolaRFusion radio is a complete 2.4 GHz radio built using a unique polar architecture that enables programmable Software Defined Radio (SDR) functionality. The result is a low-power solution including RF, baseband, PHY and MAC functionality to support IEEE 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 5.0) standards.

(Click on image to enlarge)

InnoPhase says that this digitally-intensive radio solution greatly reduces the amount of power required to transmit, process, and receive wireless information using industry standard wireless protocols. It achieves this by moving most of the radio signal processing from power-hungry analog circuits, found in wireless solutions using today's IQ-architecture, into power- and size-efficient digital logic.

The product actively manages multi-protocol coexistence for 802.11b/g/n and BLE 5.0 for demanding edge-of-network applications.

Key Features

  • The industry's lowest Power Save (DTIM) current consumption, delivering extended battery life of 50%+ in certain applications
  • Multiple wireless protocols for local area device communication and cloud connectivity
  • Embedded 80MHz Cortex-M3 microcontroller for platform control and optional application processing
  • Embedded RAM and Flash
  • Extensive set of peripheral interfaces
  • InnoPhase's patented high-efficiency Digital Power Amplifier (DPA)
  • Unique high performance, flexible Low-Noise Amplifier (flexLNA) for excellent sensitivity over a wide range of frequencies and bandwidths
  • Integrated baluns, matching networks and switches
  • Reference and real-time oscillators

Features of Evaluation Kit

  • Interface board plus mounted EVK reference board for easy evaluation
  • USB connectivity for power, loading programs into RAM, storing programs in embedded Flash memory, and terminal message printout
  • Connection to available GPIO through header pins
  • On-board chip antenna or optional external antenna through antenna connector
  • Header pins for an optional direct battery connection
  • Available port for measuring current consumption

Initial customer products developed using the Talaria TWO wireless platform have reportedly achieved battery life improvements of greater than 50% versus the competition. The company claims that with its wireless platform, products will now be able to go weeks, months or even years longer between battery charging or replacement.

"We selected InnoPhase's Talaria TWO wireless solution for our new market-leading battery-powered camera platform for use in consumer monitoring and commercial security," said Ben Bodley, CEO, Teknique, an Ambarella Solutions Partner. "The choice was clear given Talaria TWO's ability to maintain Wi-Fi connectivity at extremely low power levels and eliminating the need for a wireless hub. In addition, it greatly extended our product's battery life, lowered the overall system cost and delivered a better user experience."

InnoPhase asks interested attendees of Embedded World, Feb 26-28 in Nuremberg, Germany, to schedule a product demonstration. Key customers are now sampling the extremely low power Talaria TWO wireless platform with full commercial availability and certification slated for mid-2019.