Sequans is first to market with LTE Cat M Monarch chipset
The massive scale of the Industrial Internet of Things—billions of connected devices and sensors seamlessly communicating—is enabled only by low-cost components able to run in the field for years without requiring maintenance.
To support that vision, standards body 3GPP is working to define in Release 13 two new narrowband categories for LTE focused specifically on supporting IoT applications that don’t need high throughput. These new categories are M1 (formerly called category M) and M2 (also known as NB-IoT or narrowband-IoT). In addition to narrow bandwidths, low power consumption and low cost are key focus areas of Release 13, along with improvements to indoor coverage for both GSM and LTE.
Categories M1 and M2 represent a natural evolution following Category 1 LTE, part of the existing 3GPP LTE standards and used on today’s LTE networks for IoT applications. LTE Cat 1 throughput is capped at 10 Mbps, enabling reduced complexity and power consumption.
Sequans is the first chipmaker to announce a Cat M1/M2 solution, which caps downlink speeds at 1 Mbps (or about 300 Kbps in half-duplex operation) for Cat M1, and about 40 Kbps for Cat M2. Sequans’ Monarch chip integrates baseband, an RF transceiver, RAM and power management in a single chip in a 6.5×8 mm form factor.
Sequans CEO Georges Karam discussed the new Monarch chipset in an exclusive interview with RCR Wireless News CEO Jeff Mucci during Mobile World Congress.
“With this Monarch technology,” Karam said, “we’re going farther…not only with the pricing, but as well with low-power mode, as well as coverage extension. Our leadership on Monarch…being first in the market… attracted a lot of partners. One of them is Gemalto. They saw our time-to-market advantage with Cat M1 and Cat M2, with Monarch and they decided to join forces with us to bring modules to market and be first with this, using our Monarch chip.”
The new Monarch chipsets are slated to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2016.
With the partnership Karam mentioned, Gemalto will use the Monarch chipset and add batteries, power amplification, switches and antennas to make a complete IoT module.
Cat 1 “is more than what you need,” Karam said. “You’re not getting maybe the best performance in terms of power consumption or pricing. Now, when Cat M1, Cat M2 will be here, I believe you are going to see the market segmenting.”
He explained that applications like home security video, for instance, will require Cat 1. But, sensors and other lower power, lower throughput applications are an ideal fit for Cat M1 and Cat M2.
“We are really working on areas where Sequans can really make a difference,” Karam said, including for next-generation 5G mobile networks. “We almost reinvented all this ourselves to make LTE for IoT and we are the leader in this space by being first with Cat 1…for IoT. We are now first with Cat M1, Cat M2. It’s a huge market…and we have all the flavors. We’re leading there.”
