GSMA Intelligence recently reported that there could be as many as 2 billion cellular machine-to-machine connections by 2020. Many of these connections will utilize emerging low data rate LTE standards such as LTE Cat-0 and LTE Cat-M, specifically designed to facilitate the mass-adoption of cellular connectivity in a range of IoT and M2M applications. Moreover, many of these devices will also require additional connectivity, location, and other standards, for example LoRa, SiGFox, Ingenu, ZigBee, Thread etc.
To address the complexity of designing devices that meet these requirements in a cost and power efficient manner, we have today introduced our new Dragonfly reference platform. Dragonfly is enabled by our recently announced CEVA-XC5 and CEVA-XC8 DSP cores and is accompanied by all the hardware and software components required to rapidly design machine-type communications (MTC) systems.
Figure 1. CEVA Dragonfly Reference Platform Hardware and Software Components
CEVA Dragonfly offers system developers a flexible platform that allows for optimal hardware/software system partitioning, combining a low power vector communication DSP with a range of hardware co-processors. Such partitioning enables the software flexibility essential for upgradability and long service life of typical M2M devices, while delivering the power efficiency required to support extended battery life of up to ten years.
For product designs requiring a battery life of between one and ten years, such as smart meters or asset trackers, the CEVA-XC5 based Dragonfly2 platform is recommended. For product designs requiring a battery life of months or weeks, which will also include other advanced features such as VoLTE or video streaming, the CEVA-XC8 based Dragonfly1 platform is recommended. A 500MHz silicon-based Dragonfly development platform that includes all of these components together with RF frontends and a host interface is included in the deliverables.
Figure 2. CEVA Dragonfly 1 and Dragonfly 2 platforms
At Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, February 22-25, we will demonstrate the Dragonfly reference platform running LTE Cat-0 & GPS concurrently on its silicon-based development platform. If you’re attending the show, drop by our booth A50 in Hall 6 and see it firsthand.
Figure 3. CEVA Dragonfly Demo at Mobile World Congress
We’re also holding a webinar on March 22nd titled ‘How to Design an LTE Cat-0 Based Asset Tracker SoC‘ which will include an introduction to the Dragonfly platform.
For more information and to register for the webinar, visit http://go.ceva-dsp.com/MTC-Webinar.html.
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