Silicon Labs and Quuppa, the world leader in advanced location systems, have collaborated to deliver a highly accurate indoor asset tracking solution based on the Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) direction finding feature with advanced angle-of-arrival (AoA) technology. The solution combines the Quuppa Intelligent Location System™ with Bluetooth LE asset tags using Silicon Labs’ best-in-class Bluetooth system-on-chip (SoC) devices including the new EFR32BG22 SoC.
Silicon Labs is demonstrating the new direction finding solution at CES, Jan. 7-10, 2020, at its public suite in the Venetian/Sands Expo, Level 3, Toscana 3710. The demo showcases sub-one-meter indoor asset tracking with Bluetooth AoA technology and combines Silicon Labs’ Thunderboard Sense (http://www.silabs.com/thunderboardsense) evaluation kit and Bluetooth SoCs as asset tags with Quuppa’s Bluetooth locators and position engine for tracking.
The Silicon Labs and Quuppa Bluetooth direction finding solution targets a wide range of indoor positioning, navigation, and asset and people tracking applications for industrial IoT, logistics, security, personal medical devices, smart buildings and retail use cases. The solution can be used to optimize processes and workflows for improved productivity and efficiency in commercial and industrial environments.
“The combination of Quuppa’s turnkey infrastructure and Silicon Labs’ silicon, software and tools for asset tag design provides IoT developers with a comprehensive solution that reduces the cost and complexity of developing location positioning applications,” Fabio Belloni, chief customer officer at Quuppa. “We’re delighted to partner with Silicon Labs because they match our deep commitment and know-how to advance the state of the art in location services technology.”
Silicon Labs’ Bluetooth system-on-chip (SoC) devices and wireless modules enable developers to create ultra-low-power, low-cost asset tag designs that flexibly support large-scale applications. Asset tags based on Silicon Labs’ new EFR32BG22 Series 2 SoCs (http://www.silabs.com/bg22) can enable 10-year coin cell battery life, less than one meter accuracy and low BOM cost of less than $1 (USD) for asset tags manufactured in high volume.
“Quuppa, the pioneer and market leader in accurate Bluetooth indoor positioning technology, is an ideal infrastructure partner to help drive widespread deployment of indoor asset tracking solutions,” said Ross Sabolcik, vice president and general manager of IoT commercial and industrial products at Silicon Labs. “As the first wireless SoC supplier to support Bluetooth direction finding, we offer optimized Bluetooth silicon, software and development tools to help our customers design low-cost, low-power asset tags compatible with Quuppa’s large and growing location positioning ecosystem.”
Quuppa is a leading provider of real-time locating systems (RTLS) with more than 2,000 deployments in 50 countries. Quuppa unlocks the full potential of accurate indoor location-based services with a partner ecosystem of infrastructure, tag providers, system integrators, application developers and service providers. The heart of Quuppa’s technology solution is the Quuppa Intelligent Locating System based on standard Bluetooth LE technology using AoA methodology. Quuppa offers a scalable system comprising locator hardware, advanced positioning engines, and several software tools for system planning, configuration and telemetry. The system can be used for tracking and monitoring Quuppa compatible Bluetooth tags, mobile devices and sensors. The Quuppa Positioning Engine also offers an open API to support customer applications and system monitoring.
For more information about Silicon Labs’ Bluetooth direction finding silicon, software and development tools, visit https://www.silabs.com/bluetooth-direction-finding