Carriers, costs, and questions about longevity delay the IoT – Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis
It’s no secret that I love chip companies. I was a chip reporter for more than a decade, and I revel in tying advances in chips to new features and capabilities offered by our gadgets. So I was happy to chat with Svein-Egil Nielsen, the chief technical officer at Nordic Semiconductor. Nordic was founded in 1983, but for the past 15 years it has made Bluetooth-based chips that are placed in fitness trackers and other wearable devices.
This year, Nordic branched out from designing Bluetooth (and other 2.4GHz) chips to designing chips for cellular Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs). Specifically, it is making chips that combine a microcontroller (the chips’ brains, essentially) with an NB-IoT or LTE Cat1M radio. Nielsen explains that the addition of low-power cellular radios made sense for the company since it has long focused on energy-efficient chips for battery-powered devices.