CEVA Inc, along with its partner, Nurlink Technology, a fabless IC design company specializing in cellular IoT wireless communications, completed the first over-the-air (OTA) call on China Telecom’s NB-IoT network. The test was carried out in Nanjing, China, using the Nurlink NK6010 NB-IoT SoC connecting to China Telecom’s Cloud IoT Platform over the NB-IoT network. The OTA call represents an important milestone towards the mass market production of Nurlink’s CEVA-Dragonfly NB2 based SoC. The CEVA-Dragonfly NB2 platform, along with CEVA’s excellent technical support, provided the foundation that enabled Nurlink to achieve the milestone quickly.
The Nurlink NK6010 is an ultra-low cost and power-efficient NB-IoT SoC designed specifically for narrowband connectivity in mass market IoT devices such as smart meters, wearables, asset trackers and industrial sensors. Built based on the CEVA-Dragonfly NB2 solution, the SoC incorporates RF front-end, RF transceiver, cellular baseband, power management unit and application processor, to minimize the chip size and cost of the solution.
It supports all NB-IoT frequency bands with major global carriers, ensuring smooth and rapid certification of devices on any NB-IoT commercial network around the world. The SoC also includes an extremely low-power multi-GNSS subsystem, which supports GPS/Beidou/Galileo/GLONASS global navigation systems. This subsystem allows fast positioning while also supporting highly-accurate device tracking. NK6010 is currently undergoing testing with operators worldwide and expected to enter mass production later this year.
The CEVA-Dragonfly NB2 IP solution is a modular technology, composed of the CEVA-X1 IoT processor, an optimized RF Transceiver, baseband, and a protocol stack to offer a complete Release 14 Cat-NB2 modem IP solution that significantly reduces time-to-market and lowers entry barriers. It is a fully software-configurable solution and can be extended with multi-constellation GNSS and sensor fusion functionality. The IP includes reference silicon of the complete modem design, including an embedded CMOS RF transceiver and PA, an advanced digital front-end, physical layer firmware, and a protocol stack (MAC, RLC, PDCP, RRC, and NAS).
CEVA will be talking more about its SoC's at MWC19 Shanghai from June 26-28.
