Morse Micro has claimed the industry’s first 8-MHz Wi-Fi HaLow reference design and one of the industry’s first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED HaLow solutions. The Wi-Fi Alliance recently introduced the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED HaLow certification program for IEEE 802.11ah products. Wi-Fi HaLow technology operates in the sub-1-GHz band and enables long range and low-power connectivity, including in challenging environments for a range of IoT and IIoT applications.
Morse Micro is a Wi-Fi HaLow testbed vendor and is one of the member companies that helped drive the development of the 802.11ah certification program. The company offers certifiable Wi-Fi HaLow chipsets, modules, and reference designs.
Wi-Fi Alliance member companies, Methods2Business and Newracom, also provided test bed devices and are among the first to provide certified HaLow products.
Click for a larger image. (Source: Wi-Fi Alliance)
With the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification program announcement, research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts Wi-Fi HaLow devices will soon make their way into smart home environments.
“Wi-Fi HaLow devices such as security cameras and tablets are being used in industrial environments today, and we expect devices to soon make their way to smart home environments allowing consumers to take advantage of its longer range and lower power for applications such as battery powered cameras, video baby monitors, and other smart home products,” commented Phil Solis, research director at IDC. “Companies have been working on Wi-Fi HaLow chipsets for years and we expect shipments to break 10 million in 2022, with adoption expanding from industrial to include smart home, smart city, and retail markets.”
Wi-Fi HaLow provides low power consumption; it’s very good for battery operation because it operates in the sub-GHz range rather than 2.4 or 5 or 6 GHz; it provides a much longer distance, which is generally 10× times further than the current Wi-Fi, reaching over 1 km, said Vahid Manian, Morse Micro’s chief operating officer, in a recent interview. “It has much better penetration through materials such as walls, doors, and floors; offers a much higher density in the network, and can support all the way up to almost 8,200 stations, plus it is IPv6 compatible so it’s compatible with standard Wi-Fi.”
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MM61xx evaluation kit. Click for a larger image. (Source: Morse Micro)
Morse Micro offers a portfolio of Wi-Fi HaLow SoCs, modules, and IP, along with evaluation kits and reference designs. The company claims its MM6104 and MM6108 single-chip solutions, which are sampling now, are the industry’s smallest, fastest, and lowest power IEEE 802.11ah compliant SoCs in its Wi-Fi HaLow portfolio. The MM6104 SoC supports 1-, 2- and 4-MHz channel bandwidth, while the higher performance MM6108 SoC supports 1-, 2-, 4- and 8-MHz bandwidth and is capable of delivering tens of Mbits/s throughput to support streaming HD video.
These devices, housed in a 6 × 6-mm QFN48 package, incorporate the radio, PHY, and MAC section, supporting data rates from tens of Mbits/s to hundreds of Kbits/s. The radio supports operation in sub-GHz ISM bands worldwide between 850 MHz and 950 MHz.
In addition, the MM6108 and MM6104 RF interface provides the option to use on-chip amplification for low-power, low-cost IoT devices, or an additional external PCB-mounted power amplifier (PA) or front-end module (FEM) for ultra-long-reach applications. The RF receiver uses a high-linearity low-noise amplifier (LNA).
The Wi-Fi HaLow evaluation kits, samples of the MM6108 and MM6104 SoCs and modules, are available to key customers now.