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A European Union (EU) initiative claims to have developed a “novel” architecture that will boost the spectrum as well as energy efficiency of the Internet of Things (IoT) wireless communication. Which means it stands to benefit those billions of sensors that send in data at a regular frequency.
According to the Community Research and Development Information Service (Cordis) amassing data depends on the wireless connection of billions of cost-efficient battery-powered sensors. The scale at which this massive collection of data is envisioned is challenged by the limited energy and spectrum efficiency of today’s IoT wireless communication solutions.
A EU-funded project called ‘HEASIT’, says Cordis, dealt with the development and commercialisation of GreenOFDM, a “disruptive” innovation that will bring high data rates at a high-energy efficiency to wireless low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) for the IoT, according to project coordinator Loic Lietar. Loic has been quoted as saying, “It aimed at defining, developing and introducing to the market a modem in the form of an integrated circuit that will be the heart of low-power high-data-rate networks.” Overall, the objective was to deliver an integrated circuit that embeds a breakthrough patented algorithm.
Unique processor
Loic says what his team found out was that their architecture proved to have more value in an “adjacent market” – that is the analysis, mostly in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference of image, sound and motion, at ultra-low power. That led to GAP8, a processor that is highly energy efficient and is 20 times superior to others.
Starting with the GreenOFDM algorithm, one of the project partners developed a fully programmable solution in the form of a multicore processor with a unique energy efficiency.
The architecture built on two world-class open-source projects (RISC-V and PULP), which is a very novel approach in the semiconductor industry. At system level, they combined an emulation of GreenOFDM with the open-source protocol stack long-range wide-area network to successfully realise point-to-point radio communications.
Significant cost savings
HEASIT’s strategy was to offer a high-data-rate radio interface – GreenOFDM – to LPWANs. So what is GreenOFDM? This protocol offers a considerable cost advantage and more autonomy than WiFi and long-term evolution technology alternatives. It also maintains the existing network architecture and functionalities of LPWANs, which neither WiFi nor long-term evolution technology alternatives can do.
“The HEASIT innovation dramatically reduces the cost of deploying and operating rich sensors in the field,” the coordinator adds. “Consequently, this enables a much larger number of those sensors and ultimately significantly enriches the spectrum of IoT use cases.”
There’s already a working prototype outed in July 2018. Loic told Cordis they had sold to prospective customers over 100 development kits with the GAP8 processor.