New-Tech Europe | March 2019

Nordic nRF91 Series roll-out brings cellular IoT to any application From asset tracking to medical monitoring, Nordic’s easy-to-design-in cellular IoT delivers a compact, low power, secure LTE-M and NB-IoT module for everything Nordic Semiconductor

There are 20 million shipping containers in the world and six million are on the move at any time. Each holds around 40m 3 of valuable cargo. Keeping track of where everthing is and how it’s being handled is a logisticial nightmare; but Nordic’s nRF91 Series promises to sweep away the complexities of asset tracking and do the same for thousands of other monitoring challenges. Nordic Semiconductor is best known for its commercial and technical leadership in Bluetooth Low Energy. But now, the commercial launch and immediate availability—from key distributors such as Digi-Key Electronics, Mouser Electronics, and Premier Farnell—of the nRF9160 System- in-Package (SiP) extends the company’s wireless Internet

of Things (IoT) offering to the low power cellular IoT sector. Cellular IoT is a low power wireless area network (LPWAN) technology that takes advantage of the mature and established global cellular network. Cellular LPWANs form robust, long-range connections between local area networks (LANs) of short-range wireless sensors and the Internet - forming key element of the IoT. (See ULP WQ Spring 2018 pg10.) “Nordic Semiconductor expanded the application - range of Bluetooth Low Energy by abstracting away from the designer all unnecessary technical complexity,” explains Peder Rand, Nordic Semiconductor’s Product Manager – Cellular IoT. “The nRF9160 SiP module promises to do

the same for cellular IoT by taking a completely different approach to competing solutions.” Cellular is a notoriously complex wireless technology that only a handful of engineering teams worldwide have the expertise and experience to design from the ground-up. Nordic Semiconductor’s team came together when the company hired some of the smartest cellular R&D engineers in the world. (See ULP WQ Summer 2018 pg14.) Most of Nordic’s cellular IoT design team have been working in cellular for their entire careers and have used that expertise to design the nRF9160 from the ground-up. Strategic partnership At just 10 by 16 by 1 mm, the nRF9160 SiP is suitable for even

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