Low-power cellular IoT is positioning itself to be widely adopted in numerous markets and applications including smart utility metering, asset and people (e.g., child) tracking, fleet management, buildings security and safety, remote maintenance, smart vending machines, retail, healthcare and medical monitoring, real-time traffic monitoring, wearables, indoor and outdoor GPS navigation, smart-home technology, automotive (e.g., customized insurance based on actual driving data), and industrial and agricultural automation.
LTE-M and NB-IoT are specified by the 3GPP to provide low power, secure, reliable, future-proofed, open-standard, and interoperable cellular connectivity for cost, size, and power-constrained IoT applications. The two technologies are set to drive breadth and growth for the emerging cellular IoT market, projected to surpass 1.5 billion connections by 2021.
Nordic Semiconductor's roadmap for low-power cellular IoT includes highly integrated chipsets and advanced software for the forthcoming 3GPP Release 13 LTE-M and NB-IoT cellular technologies. Optimized for power and size, the upcoming Nordic Semiconductor nRF91 Series is designed to address the needs of emerging low-power cellular IoT applications, including long battery life, low-cost deployment and maintenance, scalability for potentially billions of devices, a miniaturized form-factor that can fit almost anywhere, and ubiquitous network coverage.
Nordic expects to sample the first nRF91 Series solutions to selected lead customers in the second half of 2017, with broad availability and production ramp following in 2018.
