In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the need for more accurate and reliable distance measurement and tracing technology has become critical. To ensure safe working environments and peace of mind for employees, Dialog Semiconductor has announced the addition of a new Wireless Ranging (WiRa) Software Development Kit (SDK) features to its Bluetooth low energy SOCs.
The latest software allows for point-to-point wireless distance measurements, thereby enabling highly accurate tracing capabilities for its DA1469x Bluetooth low energy product family to support new social distancing norms. Unlike RSSI, the WiRa SDK uses radar-like implementation to enhance distance measurement for connected devices, amounting to +/- 0.5 meters in typical situations. This result is in 10x more accuracy than the other RSSI-based localization options. The DA1469x on-chip 2.4 GHz radio interweaves Bluetooth low energy data packets with constant tone frequency exchanges and generates phase-based ranging signals.
The high-resolution, on-chip radio wave sampling ensures to provide high-quality IQ samples that form the inputs for distance determination. Thereafter, data processing algorithms filter the data for noise, interference, and reflections. The output thus received is the shortest distance over-the-air signal path length that provides the application with a distance measurement value to use. The WiRa SDK leverages the existing DA1469x wireless MCU family including its ARM Cortex-M33 application processor, M0+-based baseband processor and best-in-class radio performance to provide distance measurements from a single chip.
The data processing algorithms filter the data for noise, interference, and reflections, thereby producing the shortest over-the-air signal path length as an accurate distance output. The solution also comes equipped with a Bluetooth LE 5.1 compliant stack and software implementation that eliminates the need for hardware adaptations or an external host processor and ensures co-existence between Bluetooth communications and the distance measurement process. The overall result is greater reliability, security, and location and tracking accuracy for the IoT devices.
