Startup Wants Better IoT Radios

IoT SoC will run on energy harvesters

Rick Merritt, EETimes
8/25/2015 07:00 AM EDT

CUPERTINO, Calif. — The Internet of Things needs new lower power radios and a fresh approach to silicon design, said an expert with a startup designing IoT chips.

“I think there’s a growing realization Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee are not the right solutions” because they consumer tens of milliwatts, said Benton Calhoun, co-founder of PsiKick (Charlottesville, N.C.). “People are talking about new solutions, but it’s not clear what they are yet,” he told an audience of several hundred silicon designers at the annual Hot Chips event here.

For its part, PsiKick is designing an ultrawideband transceiver into an upcoming IoT node chip geared to consume a total of less than 30 microwatts. But UWB comes with a number of tradeoffs in potential interference, lack of compatibility and relatively low data rates.

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