Taoglas, provider of IoT and M2M antenna products, launched Wednesday its initial range of small-form-factor ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas designed to enable centimeter-level positioning and angle-of-arrival applications, including asset tracking, follow-me drones, healthcare monitoring, smart home services, and other applications that demand high-performance indoor localization capabilities. The antennas offer high efficiencies across a wide spectrum of frequency bands from 3 GHz to 10 GHz.
The UWB antennas were designed for use with the DecaWave DW1000 chip, and are also compatible with any other UWB sensor modules on the market. Since its launch in December 2013, more than 3.5 million units of the DW1000 have shipped across multiple industries.
Taoglas provides advanced antenna and RF solutions to the world’s leading wireless and Internet of Things (IoT) companies. With five design, support and test centers in Ireland, Germany, Taiwan and the USA, Taoglas works with its customers to provide the best solution for their unique antenna and RF challenges, quickly and easily. In-house manufacturing in Taiwan and USA enable delivery of different wireless and IoT use cases, from LTE to GNSS, DSRC, and NFC and beyond to 5G. This expertise is proven in the huge number of success stories across a variety of applications, including telematics, automotive, metering, smart grid, wearables, medical devices, remote monitoring, and video broadcasting.
From real-time location of people and assets in factories, hospitals and mines, to automotive keyless entry systems, to drones, connected home and sports, the accurate location and secure communications capability of the DW1000 has already taken numerous applications to new heights.
Indoor wireless positioning has long been hampered by technologies that were not designed for this purpose, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and assisted GPS. UWB is a low-power digital wireless technology that offers significant increases in location precision and range while transmitting large amounts of digital data short distances over a wide spectrum of frequency bands. UWB’s low-power requirements offer increased battery life of sensors and tags, leading to reduction in overall operational costs.
Taoglas’ range of UWB antennas, designed in Taoglas’ Munich, Germany, engineering center, features both state-of-the-art flexible and rigid PCB embedded UWB antennas as well as UWB embedded SMT chip antennas.
The flexible FXUWB range of antennas were developed utilizing a simple “peel and stick” assembly process, attaching securely to non-metal surfaces via 3M adhesive, with a highly flexible micro-coaxial cable mounting. There is also a version in a rigid PCB format, if desired. The UWB chip antennas are designed to be surface mounted directly onto a PCB. Both series of antennas help designers future-proof devices, keeping costs low while covering all common UWB commercial bands.
“Today’s emerging applications require very precise indoor localization of assets, objects and people,” said Ronan Quinlan, co-CEO, Taoglas. “UWB can work as a type of ‘indoor GPS’ to help solve the precision dilemma for indoor applications, bringing much greater levels of precision than current technologies. We optimize complex antenna performance parameters such as the Group Delay, Polarization and Fidelity Factor. Taoglas’ first-to-market line of UWB antennas are designed to help our customers capitalize on this need for real-time precision localization, with the quality, reliability and flexibility they’ve come to expect from working with Taoglas. One particular antenna we co-developed exclusively with DecaWave is the UWCCP.01 circularly polarized chip antenna, the first mass-market antenna specifically designed to enable a new generation of autonomous applications.”
“Antennas play a key role in our customers’ applications. Performance is a given for customers, but the capability to adapt to the constraints of the applications—size, shape, electronics environment—is equally important as end products get smaller and smaller. DecaWave is really pleased to partner with Taoglas, as their expertise is not only in delivering high-performance, off-the-shelf antennas, but also to provide customization services that will be highly beneficial to our customers,” said Ciaran Connell, CEO and co-founder, DecaWave.
