Camarillo, California, USA – Semtech Corporation, a leading supplier of analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors, has introduced the SX1272, the first product in a new long-range RFIC platform that boosts the transmission range of the devices to up to 15 kilometres.
This device integrates Semtech’s new LoRa™ (long range) modulation technology to enable drastic range improvements over alternative modulation methods. The maximum distance today of a smart meter transciever in Europe utilising FSK modulation is between one and two kilometres. The SX1272, utilising LoRa™ and operating under the same conditions and regulatory limits, can transmit more than 15 km.
The SX1272 is designed for industrial control, agriculture/irrigation, smart metering and sensor network applications. The additional range provided by LoRa will eliminate the need for repeaters in these applications, significantly simplifying the system design and lowering the total cost of deployment. The range extension provided by LoRa™ also makes the device ideal for emerging smart city, Internet of Things and M2M applications.
The SX1272 achieves receiver sensitivity up to -137 dBm utilising a low-cost crystal. This compares to today’s state-of-the-art FSK devices that can achieve sensitivity of -115 dBm with a comparable crystal or -125 using an expensive temperature controlled crystal oscillator (TCXO).
Additionally, the SX1272 has a 25 dB improvement over FSK devices for rejecting in-band interfering signals. This makes the device especially effective in industrial, scientific and medical (ISM)-band applications such as security and metering because it provides immunity from sub-GHz frequency 4G/LTE signals. This immunity, combined with the SX1272’s highly linear RF front-end, makes it the most reliable and robust solution for operating in the presence of strong interfering signals.
“The SX1272 and LoRa™ is a significant wireless technology advancement that will drive the next volume market deployments for smart cities, sensor networks, IOT and M2M,” said Jean-Paul Bardyn, Chief Technical Officer and Vice President R&D for Semtech’s Wireless & Sensing Product Group. “The long range capabilities of the device combined with Semtech’s low power expertise give the company a unique market position that will drive significant growth for our Wireless and Sensing business unit.”
The fast growth of the IOT/M2M market – predicted by industry analysts to total 50 billion nodes by 2020 – provides another great opportunity for the SX1272 with LoRa™ technology. There is a dramatic need for an improved physical layer in this market for long range, low power for battery operation, and low cost for volume deployment. LoRa™ is the ideal solution to meet these needs and a great complement to 2G/3G GSM in this rapidly growing market.
The SX1272 supports GFSK, FSK, GMSK, and OOK modulation in addition to LoRa and is designed to support WMBus, IEEE 802.15.4g (SUN), FCC 15.247, ARIB T96/108, EN 300-220 as well as other worldwide standards and regulations.
Semtech Corporation is a leading supplier of analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors for high-end consumer, computing, communications and industrial equipment. Products are designed to benefit the engineering community as well as the global community. The company is dedicated to reducing the impact it, and its products, have on the environment. Internal green programmes seek to reduce waste through material and manufacturing control, use of green technology and designing for resource reduction. Publicly traded since 1967, Semtech is listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol SMTC.
