Weightless SIG Announce Weightless Specification Silicon For M2M

Developed by Weightless SIG Promoter Group Member, Neul, and dubbed ‘Iceni’, samples are available today to select partners to begin testing and development of new white space-enabled solutions. More details of the silicon can be found on the company’s website.

“This is a seminal moment in the evolution of Weightless technology” commented Professor William Webb, CEO of the Weightless Special Interest Group, adding “for the first time designers around the world can begin developing next generation M2M solutions using Weightless technology with silicon designed explicitly to be compatible with the Standard”.

Developed by the team behind the world’s first single-chip Bluetooth device, Iceni operates within white space spectrum to access the high quality and license free UHF spectrum. Iceni and Weightless together dramatically reduce the costs and increase battery life in machines connected to the network opening up applications that are not technically or commercially feasible using alternative technologies.

James Collier, CEO of Neul commented “Weightless is a major opportunity for silicon vendors. With a forecasted 5-10 billion devices to be shipped per year, this is a market that is bigger than cellular, and one that will support as many as a dozen major silicon vendors. The Weightless SIG already has silicon companies as members, and we expect a number of them to develop their own silicon.”

Bob Lockhart, Senior Research Analyst at Pike Research - a part of Navigant, said “The anticipated exponential growth in machine-to-machine communications, as ever more ‘smart’ devices find their way into homes and industry such as electricity grids, argues for innovative, low-cost approaches to M2M communication. Without low-cost communications between devices, the so-called Internet of Things is likely to remain only wishful thinking.”

The machine to machine or Internet of Things market is widely forecasted to be worth over a trillion US dollars in value and to enable tens of billions of connected devices by 2020.