Skyworks Solutions has announced that its family of connectivity modules are powering the rapidly emerging 5G Massive Internet of Things (Massive IoT) market. Specifically, Skyworks’ turnkey engines provide the critical wireless functionality that is becoming essential for the billions of devices, objects, and machines across an increasingly connected world.
IoT manufacturers are quickly embracing cellular connectivity given its ability to deliver a secure, real-time device-to-cloud connection needed for remote monitoring, control, or management. This low-power, wide area network (LPWAN) capability is ideal for widely adopted consumer products such as smartwatches, wearables, and asset trackers, as well as industrial and infrastructure applications such as gas, water, and electric metering, machine monitoring, factory automation, supply chain, and logistics oversight.
With the emergence of 5G, IoT devices utilizing Skyworks’ carrier-certified solutions will go to market faster and be more cost-effective than implementing discrete architectures. Skyworks has established itself as a leader in developing breakthrough 5G platforms for mobile and has now combined this expertise with market-leading modem technology to provide extremely power-efficient and unmatched integration for IoT innovations globally.
According to a recent 5G Americas white paper, in parallel to the 5G rollout, cellular IoT (also known as Massive IoT) is becoming the technology of choice for wide-area IoT applications. In a 2019 Mobility Report from Ericsson, cellular-connected IoT devices are predicted to grow from 1 billion units in 2018 to 4.1 billion units by 2024, representing a 27 percent compounded annual growth rate. As a subset, LTE-M/NB-IoT (Massive IoT) is expected to represent 45 percent of this figure, or roughly two billion connections, up from less than 10 million in 2018.
About Skyworks’ Massive IoT Portfolio
Skyworks’ innovations expedite time-to-market by incorporating all the required functionality to deliver maximum performance and optimized power efficiency in the most compact package available. The flagship SKY66430-11 is the world’s smallest, fully certified all-in-one device and incorporates a multi-band, multi-chip system-in-package (SiP) enabling cellular LTE-M/NB-IoT (half-duplex FDD) architectures. By integrating Sequans’ Monarch SQN3330 chip, customers have an entire RF front-end (RFFE), transceiver, power management, memory, and baseband modem for an LTE multi-band radio operating in the 700 to 2200 MHz frequency range.
Skyworks’ SiP has been certified by leading worldwide carriers including KDDI, NTT Docomo, SoftBank, and Verizon. Early adopters of Skyworks’ Massive IoT portfolio include Pebblebee, Daatrics, and GeoTraq.
Other products from Skyworks’ Massive IoT portfolio include the SKY68020-11, SKY68001-31, SKY68001-41, SKY68018-11 and SKY77368-11 multiband RFFE modules supporting up to Power Class 3 (+23 dBm) half-duplex transceiver platforms. These solutions are designed for global 5G Massive IoT network deployments in low-band and mid-band frequencies in addition to providing 2G backward compatibility, either natively or through auxiliary ports. These 5G-ready devices work in tandem with all major LTE-M/NB-IoT modems and are currently available.
