Silicon Labs has announced BG22, an energy-efficient Bluetooth location service solution. It incorporates advanced software which is designed to maximize the location-finding capabilities of the BG22 series of SoCs and SiP modules. The device incorporates accurate, low-power Bluetooth devices to simplify Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD) location services. This product family combines best-in-class, ultra-low transmit and receive power (4.1 mA TX at 0 dBm, 3.6 mA RX) with a high-performance, low-power ARM® Cortex®-M33 core (27 µA/MHz active, 1.2 µA sleep). The device can opearate for up to 10 years on a single coin cell battery and can be used in applications such as asset tracking, warehouse management, IoT for Healthcare products, and more through real-time location services (RTLS).
“As the largest, pure-play IoT company in the world, we focus on providing complete wireless IoT solutions for the edge, including silicon, software, tools, and support,” said Daniel Cooley, CTO of Silicon Labs. “Today’s new Bluetooth location services offering further proves our belief that we can deliver differentiated solutions to our customers by thinking of IoT as a complete platform, rather than a singular piece of hardware.”
With improvement in the Logistics sector and warehouse management, asset tracking, locating inventory and other physical assets are being improved, but monitoring and management of assets can often be a time-consuming process. It can also lead to waste, as assets are lost behind shelves or in unexpected locations. These issues are faced by almost all the sectors.
Although there exists a lot of location-based technologies, they are plagued by limitations that affect their usefulness at scale. GPS is ineffective indoors, Wi-Fi has varying degrees of accuracy, and the very-accurate ultra-wideband (UWB) can be more expensive than other solutions and has high energy requirements. The BG22 employs Bluetooth which is a mature technology that can overcome many of these barriers with new software. This solution can easily be employed in many sectors which include logistics, healthcare for patient monitoring, asset tracking, etc.
