Ultra-low power technology helps BLE enter the passive application market

Realizing the "Internet of Everything" is the ultimate goal of the entire IoT industry. According to IoT Analytic statistics, the number of active IoT terminals worldwide is expected to grow to 27 billion in 2025, but there is still a large gap from the 100 billion market expected by the industry. With the in-depth expansion of IoT scenarios, the rigid constraints of terminal costs and energy supply limitations caused by application scenarios have become prominent. Judging from the development trend of IoT connections, the future 100 billion-level "Internet of Everything" will inevitably be built on the basis of passive IoT.

 

Passive IoT refers to the terminal node devices connected to the network that do not need to be equipped with power cords or built-in batteries. They support their normal operation by collecting micro-energy in the environment to realize functions such as data collection, transmission and distributed computing.

 

Definition of technical goals of passive Internet of Things, source: IoT Media

 

Some people believe that passive IoT is a derivative concept of RFID technology, equating passive IoT with RFID technology, and even confusing passive IoT devices with "tags". This is caused by a fixed mindset. RFID technology does match passive IoT in the key point of "passive", but the current RFID function is single and cannot meet the needs of IoT to integrate communication, perception, edge computing and other functions. It is limited to "tag" applications and cannot be expanded to other scenarios. In fact, as early as 2021, Huawei proposed the concept of 5.5G passive IoT Passive IoT: expand the transmission distance of scenarios supported by passive IoT devices to 100 meters, abandon dedicated readers and writers and replace them with general devices, so that terminals have the function of self-transmitting data through cellular gateway nodes.

 

Huawei's solution concept points to the ultra-low power consumption BLE technology. In response, Phyplus Technologies, the original manufacturer of domestic IoT Bluetooth chips, provides a complete self-developed domestic passive IoT chip solution.

 

1. Ultra-low power IoT system-level chip architecture

Phyplus Technologies has had many years of successful practice in the field of Internet of Things. In response to the needs of high performance, high reliability, high security, and high energy efficiency ratio of passive Internet of Things, it has developed its own chip overall architecture and on-chip power/clock management method with coordinated software and hardware, and achieved full-stack integration of high-integration and ultra-low power system-level chips. Based on the high-efficiency hierarchical management mode, it realizes low-power management of core needs such as environmental energy collection and storage, event recognition and driving, and edge computing of passive Internet of Things. The functions cover all the needs of passive Internet of Things, and the application will be expanded to voice large model data entry terminals, sensor self-organizing networks, wearable medical continuous electrochemical monitoring, new energy vehicle intelligent control, asset positioning and tracking and other segmented scenarios.

 

 

2. Ultra-low power multi-mode wireless communication hardware and software collaborative design

The chip integrates an ultra-low power multi-mode RF transceiver, on-chip communication coordinated power/clock management, baseband processor and software protocol stack, breaking through the limitations of power consumption on noise figure, linearity, dynamic range and integration, and achieving sub-milliwatt RF performance; it supports diversified communication protocols such as BLE/Mesh/Zigbee/Matter/Sub-GHz, and achieves full coverage of local/wide area Internet of Things.

 

In order to break the inherent trend of self-organizing networks to maintain wireless connections through timed wake-up and realize a high-efficiency wireless self-organizing network protocol, we have developed a hierarchical RF wake-up method within the self-organizing network. At the same time, we have designed a self-organizing network protocol that balances multiple parameters such as dynamic power consumption, wireless communication distance and rate based on the technology of adaptively adjusting the communication rate between sensor nodes based on routing information.

 

3. Autonomous instruction set RISC-V processor security processor

 

Based on the high security requirements of IoT data, the chip integrates a Montgomery hardware key generator based on the MCU encryption secure boot mechanism and multi-stage pipeline architecture, and provides a secure code running space solution based on RISC-V autonomous instruction set and memory mapping.

 

The chip integrates Flash, ROM, SRAM, Efuse and other storage configurations, and designs a low-power storage system to ensure the performance and reliability of fast and continuous access to data in IoT scenarios.

 

4. Multi-source collaborative and efficient energy collection and management

 

In response to the indispensable energy harvesting needs of passive Internet of Things, in order to solve the problems of multi-source collaborative energy acquisition and circuit low-voltage cold start and high-efficiency energy conversion, management and storage, Phyplus adopts the buck-boost dual-mode energy harvesting and voltage conversion architecture and maximum power point tracking and hierarchical self-starting technology, and designs a reconfigurable energy harvesting circuit based on multi-source collaboration such as micro-light energy, micro-kinetic energy, temperature difference energy, and radio frequency energy to achieve interface circuit matching, adaptively adjust the MPPT circuit state optimization parameters, and improve the efficiency of multi-source collaborative energy acquisition.

 

5. Extremely low energy consumption multi-physical quantity sensor

 

In order to meet the perception function requirements of IoT devices, Phyplus designed a near-threshold low-power and high-precision signal chain circuit, reduced the amount of invalid interference data through low-power hierarchical pattern recognition technology, and realized the single-chip integration of multi-mode low-power sensor interfaces for environmental signals such as sound, vibration, light, electrochemistry, and electromagnetic fields.

 

The self-developed lightweight convolutional neural network based on embedded processor is used for the extraction and identification of key sensor information, realizing an ultra-low power multi-physical quantity sensor interface and intelligent perception information processing system that can operate independently.

 

BLE-based passive IoT has successful cases internationally. Wiliot IoT Pixels, a BLE product from Israel's Wiliot, is powered by capturing weak signals from 4G/5G, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, LoRa, etc. This tiny, low-cost, self-powered tag, which is only the size of a stamp, can sense a range of physical and environmental data including temperature, liquid level, movement, position change, humidity, and proximity, and then input this data into the Wiliot cloud. The product is currently used in consumer production and retail scenarios such as vaccine bottles and food packaging.

 

Wiliot IoT Pixels , source: Wiliot

 

Atmosic, a US company, has further expanded the use scenarios of BLE passive IoT devices. Atmosic believes that by 2024, the IoT device market will increasingly tend to devices with stronger processing power, more functions (security and positioning) and lower power consumption (passive). For example, wearable portable medical products, which have seen rapid growth in market demand in recent years, require a very thin size, but at the same time require reliable battery performance to provide monitoring functions for a long time without interruption.

 

Atmosic chip terminal equipment positioning, source: Atmosic

 

Phyplus Technologies (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. focuses on high-performance RF and mixed-signal chip design. It has independently developed a complete high-performance mixed-signal IP system with independent intellectual property rights in 28nm/55nm/180nm processes. It has core technologies such as independent intellectual property multi-standard communication protocol stack, high-performance low-power RF circuit, high-performance ADC/DAC, ultra-high-speed SerDes and clock, flexible and secure system-level chip architecture, digital signal processing algorithm, etc. It has a complete design, mass production and quality system. The core RF performance and power consumption indicators of the low-power Bluetooth chip PHY62XX series are at the international leading level. It has passed the international Bluetooth Alliance, CSA, and Apple MFi certification. Its customers cover industrial, medical, voice, automotive, consumer and other fields, and the cumulative delivery of chips has exceeded 500 million pieces.

 

 

Phyplus is actively deploying ultra-low power, multi-modal, full-stack wireless IoT system-level chips with independent intellectual property rights that integrate new passive IoT core technologies such as high-performance RISC-V, environmental energy harvesting circuits, ultra-low power IoT RF transceiver circuit architecture and RF wake-up technology, BLE/Mesh/Zigbee/Matter/Sub-GHz diversified communication protocol stacks, etc., to meet the IoT's low power consumption, diversity, security and high reliability requirements. It is expected that the first generation of products in the series will be released at the end of 2023, and tens of millions of applications will be deployed in multiple fields within two years.

 

Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MDBv1BsNQYTyJg4xucDMJQ