GPS World

Tag: Decawave

  • Big acquisition: Qorvo to acquire location company Decawave

    Big acquisition: Qorvo to acquire location company Decawave

    logos-Decawave

    Qorvo, a provider of RF solutions, is acquiring Decawave, as well as Custom MMIC. Financial details have not been disclosed.

    “This acquisition is by far the biggest in the indoor location industry,” according to Bruce Krulwich, founder of Grizzly Analytics. “While the price is not disclosed, I and others have estimated it at $400-500 million.”

    “Apple is using their own UWB chips in upcoming iPhones, but their own chips are too big and use too much power to be used in smartwatches or other small devices,” Krulwich said. “Decawave’s chips will enable Qurvo to sell compatible UWB chips to a much wider range of markets.Apple’s use of UWB in iPhones is the tipping point for UWB. With Apple’s stamp of approval, UWB will be incorporated into a wide range of location-aware electronics, including robots, drones, wearables, smartwatches and more.”

    “The biggest implications for this acquisition are not only in the RTLS market, but also in the areas of internet of things, wearables and location-aware electronics,” Krulwich said. “UWB is being used in next-generation products like drones by Intel, robots by iRobot, and autonomous vehicle movement by Segway.”

    Bob Bruggeworth, president and chief executive officer of Qorvo, said in a third-quarter financial release that the company was “looking forward to welcoming two industry-leading teams, Decawave and Custom MMIC, to the Qorvo family, expanding our technology portfolio and product offerings.”

    Decawave is an Irish fabless semiconductor company specializing in precise location and connectivity applications. The acquisition will advance market penetration of IR-UWB and enable broad global adoption of the technology.

    Decawave was founded in Dublin in 2007 by current CEO Ciaran Connell and CTO Michael McLaughlin. The co-founders had a vision that the new IR-UWB technology, based on a nascent IEEE standard, could deliver ultra-accurate location in a way that would revolutionize people’s lives like GPS did in the 1990s.

    Twelve years later, IR-UWB is on the verge of becoming the next essential component technology, like GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth before it. Already shipping in millions of smartphones and cars, and across more than 40 other verticals, IR-UWB is enabling accurate indoor location services, secure communications, context aware user interfaces and advanced analytics.

    “We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Decawave by Qorvo,” said co-founder and CEO Ciaran Connell. “We have created an incredibly unique technology, but we understand that to embrace the opportunity in front of us, we will need greater resources to execute at scale, accelerate our innovation and product launches and to continue to support our growing customer base with the same level of service.

    “Joining forces with Qorvo’s leading expertise in RF technology, their experience in serving very high-volume markets like Mobile but also the thousands of customers in Industrial and Enterprise, is, for Decawave, a perfect combination to scale and further accelerate the adoption of IR-UWB.”

    Eric Creviston, President of Qorvo Mobile Products, said, “We’re very pleased to welcome the Decawave team, which we believe will enhance Qorvo’s product and technology leadership while expanding new opportunities in mobile, automotive and IoT. We look forward to building on the groundbreaking work that Decawave has done and helping to drive new applications and businesses using their unique UWB capability.”

    Decawave co-founder Michael McLaughlin added, “From proving a new technology, to building new markets and to today joining a Tier 1 semiconductor company, the past 12 years have been a challenging and fantastic journey.

    “None of this would have been possible without the dedication and passion of Decawave employees as well as the constant support from our lead investor Atlantic Bridge, Act Venture Capital, Summit Bridge, Enterprise Ireland and our business angels. To all others who accompanied us on this journey we also say a sincere and profound thank you and we look forward to the next chapter for IR-UWB.”

    In the coming months and years Decawave and Qorvo will:

    • Continue to contribute to the IEEE, Car Connectivity Consortium, FiRa and UWB alliance to define next-generation PHYs and protocols, ensuring interoperability across applications and fueling IR-UWB adoption,
    • Accelerate the roadmap of ICs and modules, leveraging their respective R&D strengths and product portfolio to bring even more IR-UWB solutions to the market,
    • Pursue existing partnerships and investments in enablement to offer flexible and easy to integrate IR-UWB solutions to our customers.

     

  • Taoglas launches ultra-wideband antennas for indoor positioning

    Taoglas launches ultra-wideband antennas for indoor positioning

    Taoglas has launched a range of small-form-factor ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas specifically designed to enable centimeter-level positioning and angle-of-arrival applications.

    The FXUWB10, UWC.01 and UWCCP.01 ultra-wideband antennas by Taoglas.

    Applications include asset tracking, follow-me drones, healthcare monitoring, smart home services and other applications that demand high-performance indoor localization capabilities, the company said.

    The antennas offer high efficiencies across a wide spectrum of frequency bands, from 3 GHz to 10 GHz.

    Indoor wireless positioning has long been hampered by technologies that were not designed for this purpose, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and assisted GPS.

    Taoglas will be exhibiting in Booth 614 at Mobile World Congress Americas, Sept. 12-14, in San Francisco.

    Ultra-Wideband. UWB is a low-power digital wireless technology that offers significant increases in location precision and range while transmitting large amounts of digital data short distances over a wide spectrum of frequency bands. UWB’s low-power requirements offer increased battery life of sensors and tags, leading to reduction in overall operational costs.

    Taoglas’ range of UWB antennas, designed in Taoglas’ Munich, Germany, engineering center, features both state-of-the-art flexible embedded UWB antennas and UWB embedded SMT chip antennas. According to the company, the flexible FXUWB range of antennas were developed utilizing a “peel and stick” assembly process, attaching securely to non-metal surfaces via 3M adhesive with a flexible micro-coaxial cable mounting.

    The UWB chip antennas are designed to be surface mounted directly onto a printed circuit board (PCB). Both series of antennas help designers future-proof devices, keeping costs low while covering all common UWB commercial bands.

    “Today’s emerging applications require very precise indoor localization of assets, objects and people,” said Ronan Quinlan, co-CEO for Taoglas. “UWB can work as a type of ‘indoor GPS’ to help solve the precision dilemma for indoor applications, bringing much greater levels of precision than current technologies. We optimize complex antenna performance parameters such as the Group Delay, Polarization and Fidelity Factor. Taoglas’ first-to-market line of UWB antennas are designed to help our customers capitalize on this need for real-time precision localization.”

    Autonomous Antenna. One antenna that Taoglas co-developed exclusively with DecaWave is the UWCCP.01 circularly polarized chip antenna, a mass-market antenna specifically designed to enable a new generation of autonomous applications.

    The DecaWave DW1000 chip.

    The UWB antennas were designed for use with the DecaWave DW1000 chip and are also compatible with any other UWB sensor modules on the market, the company added. Since its launch in December 2013, more than 3.5 million units of the DW1000 have shipped across multiple industries.

    From real-time location of people and assets in factories, hospitals and mines, to automotive keyless entry systems, to drones, connected home and sports, the accurate location and secure communications capability of the DW1000 has already taken numerous applications to new heights.

    “Antennas play a key role in our customers’ applications. Performance is a given for customers but the capability to adapt to the constraints of the applications — size, shape, electronics environment — is equally important as end products get smaller and smaller,” said Ciaran Connell, CEO and co-founder, DecaWave. “DecaWave is really pleased to partner with Taoglas, as their expertise is not only in delivering high-performance, off-the-shelf antennas, but also to provide customization services that will be highly beneficial to our customers.”

  • Decawave ships 1 million ultra-wideband micro-location chips

    Decawave ships 1 million ultra-wideband micro-location chips

    Decawave-DW1000Chip4-WDecawave, which specializes in precise location and connectivity applications, has reached a milestone for its micro-location, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) technology, surpassing one million Decawave chips shipped.

    The chip’s popularity reflects the increasing demand for accurate micro-location solutions from end users and customers within Internet of Things (IoT), consumer and industrial markets. According to the company, Decawave has a target to reach five million units shipped in the course of 2017.

    Decawave offers IR-UWB wireless technology for precise location and connectivity applications that can identify the specific location of any object or person within a guaranteed indoor location accuracy of 10 centimeters.

    IR-UWB is becoming a key factor in the IoT market and is impacting how developers are taking devices and smart applications to the next level of context awareness, Decawave said in a press release.

    The increase in demand for accurate location-based applications is evident across sectors including consumer markets such as connected homes, phone accessories, drones and sports analytics; industrial with connected buildings, factory automation and healthcare.

    Decawave technology also will be embedded in cars in 2017.

    The industrial market has been the first market to leverage Decawave’s technology and several Decawave customer solutions are already in the field. Decawave has 15 industrial partners that can deliver software, hardware or turn-key systems to end customers.

    “The market for next-generation indoor location technologies with improved accuracy is beginning to advance with solid use cases and adoption. UWB is clearly carving out its space, with ABI Research forecasting strong growth across a range of verticals,” said Patrick Connolly, Principal analyst at ABI Research. “The market opportunity is quite large and companies like Decawave that are leading the charge in UWB are well positioned to experience continued growth.”

    Consumer products. The consumer products —  some of which were presented at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January — are starting to ship now. For instance, Pixie tags allow customers to accurately locate, protect and organize their valuables.

    Also at CES, Decawave highlighted ShotTracker, developed with sporting-goods company Spalding, for multi-player basketball tracking. The chip was also featured in Jaguar’s connected car demonstration.

    ShotTracker captures every player statistic for multiple players in real time.
    ShotTracker captures every basketball player’s statistic for multiple players in real time.

    In the consumer segment, there will also be opportunities in access control, remote controls, connected light, home robot and trusted-zones applications that leverage IR-UWB accuracy, reliability and immunity to relay attack schemes to grant or deny access to wireless-networks and connected devices.

    “Two years after launching the technology, Decawave continues to gain traction with 1,800 customers across 68 countries using Decawave’s IR-UWB and an extra 70 to 80 new customers each month,” said Ciaran Connell, CEO of Decawave. “This is phenomenal and shows our commitment as well as market interest and future demand. We’re thrilled that UWB is finally seeing market momentum. We know its potential and now our customers are experiencing it as well.”

    Decawave’s partner Quantitec showed its RTLS indoor positioning at Nokia’s booth at Mobile World Congress and at the Bosch Connected World where it was featured in the company’s advanced localization technology, as a key element of a Track and Trace solution.