Riot Micro a developer of purpose-built silicon for wireless IoT applications has made its market debut with the industry’s lowest power baseband modem chip for the cellular Internet of Things (IoT). The Riot Micro RM1000 is built using an innovative approach that applies BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and Wi-Fi architecture techniques to deliver a cellular IoT solution with the low power and cost levels characteristic of short-range wireless systems. It is available now to module manufacturers and OEMs designing NB-IoT and eMTC systems including asset management, home automation, industrial, point-of-sale, smart energy, vending and automotive applications.
To develop the RM1000, Riot Micro assembled a team of engineers with extensive expertise in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and LTE design to create an LTE PHY and L2/L3 protocol stack specifically optimized to meet the 3GPP Release 13 requirements for Cat-NB1 NBIoT and Cat-M1 eMTC. By providing granular control over system resources, the innovative hardware-based architecture minimizes active power consumption in all use cases. This design approach significantly reduces silicon area and active power consumption compared to alternative signal processor-based solutions.
Riot’s RM1000 is a hardware-centric baseband controller, tightly coupled to an optimized LTE protocol stack running on an ultra-power efficient integrated processor. The PHY layer implemented completely in hardware enables minimal eDRX cycle power consumption and extremely fast wake/sleep transition times. These power savings mean that IoT modules based on the RM1000 can run longer on lower capacity batteries, further saving on system cost.
Riot’s hardware-based architecture assures that power consumption is always minimized regardless of traffic patterns and use cases. Alternative solutions typically require a 100 MHz+ processor speed, external memory, and on-chip PLLs for a high-speed clock, increasing silicon area, power consumption, and cost. Software-based PHY solutions also have longer startup and shutdown due to firmware load and processing, which ultimately costs battery life.
The RM1000 is available now, supplied to OEMs and module manufacturers developing
custom solution, in an 8 mm x 8 mm 68 pad QFN package or a 3.5×3.2 mm WLCSP
package. Riot Micro will offer a full-range of customer support services, including reference designs, for evaluation and module design.
