Taoglas has launched an industry-first range of small-form-factor ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas specifically designed to enable centimeter-level positioning and angle-of-arrival applications, including asset tracking, follow-me drones, healthcare monitoring, smart home services, and other applications that demand high-performance indoor localization capabilities. 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. 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 and rigid PCB embedded UWB antennas as well as UWB embedded SMT chip antennas. The flexible FXUWB range of antennas were developed utilizing a simple “peel and stick” assembly process, attaching securely to non-metal surfaces via 3M adhesive, with a highly flexible micro-coaxial cable mounting. There is also a version in a rigid PCB format, if desired. The UWB chip antennas are designed to be surface mounted directly onto a PCB. Both series of antennas help designers future-proof devices, keeping costs low while covering all common UWB commercial bands.
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. 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.
To learn more about Taoglas’ range of UWB antennas, visit Taoglas at Mobile World Congress Americas, September 12-14, 2017, in San Francisco.
