Imagination collaborates with Cascoda

Cascoda’s patented radio architecture significantly increases the range of wireless personal area networks (WPANs) without compromising on power consumption. Based on this unique architecture, the CA-8210 transceiver for 802.15.4 communications in the 2.4GHz band can achieve whole house coverage without external amplifier components. For many IoT applications, this can decrease equipment, installation, and maintenance costs.

Says Bruno Johnson, CEO, Cascoda: “We are very pleased to bring our innovative radio technology to Imagination’s Ci40 – the most complete IoT development kit in the market. Cascoda’s technology helps overcome a key challenge of IoT systems by providing enhanced-range low-power connectivity. This is extremely important for devices that may need to run on battery power for weeks or months at a time. We believe that the Ci40 and the impressive ecosystem around it will help to overcome other challenges associated with developing world-class IoT platforms for prototyping and volume production alike.”

Says Paul Evans, Director of Business Operations, Imagination: “We are delighted to work with an innovative young semiconductor company like Cascoda who offers a highly competitive solution with world-class technical support. The Creator Ci40 kit is the easiest way to build consumer and industrial IoT applications for health monitoring, home automation, agriculture, smart cities, security, safety-critical connected sensors, and just about anything else you can imagine. The microcomputer at the heart of the kit is a showcase for Imagination’s IP technologies including MIPS CPUs and Ensigma radio processors (RPUs). We’re delighted to roll out this powerful kit to hobbyists and businesses around the world.”

The Creator Ci40 IoT-in-a-Box development kit enables individual makers to build innovative connected projects and lets small to medium sized enterprises and entrepreneurs quickly prototype IoT platforms which can be easily turned into real products for volume production. The main development board is the Creator Ci40 microcomputer with a dual-core, dual-threaded 550MHz MIPS processor. OS support includes GNU/Linux distributions such as OpenWrt, Debian, Contiki and Google’s Brillo OS for IoT. Creator Ci40 features numerous I/Os and peripherals so users can add a wide choice of accessories and expansion boards. The Ci40 also features a dedicated TPM chip for added security, a vital requirement for IoT applications.

In addition to the 802.15.4 6LoWPAN functionality, the Creator Ci40 microcomputer also features support for other key low-power wireless and wired protocols, including 802.11ac 2x2 WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1 (Smart + Classic) and super-fast Ethernet.

Creator Ci40 is the ultimate IoT-in-a-box development kit. It includes not only the hardware building blocks needed to quickly prototype a wireless IoT system from scratch, but most importantly the open source software frameworks, network stacks and cloud connectivity capabilities required to securely connect and authenticate devices to the cloud. The Creator Ci40 board is a high-performance, low-power microcomputer based on a subsystem optimised by us specifically for IoT applications.