DA14695-00HQDEVKT-RANG

Renesas' Wireless Ranging (WiRa™) Software Development Kit (SDK) enhances the DA1469x family of Bluetooth^® Low Energy (LE) SoCs with highly accurate and reliable distance measurement capabilities. Current market offerings fall short due to radio signal strength indicator (RSSI), a flawed measure that is sensitive to radio signal blockages. Unlike RSSI, the WiRa™ SDK uses radar-like implementation to greatly enhance distance measurement for connected devices, amounting to +/- 0.5 meters in typical situations. The result is a solution with 10x the accuracy of competing RSSI-based localization options.

The WiRa™ SDK's 2.4GHz radio interweaves Bluetooth Low Energy data packets with constant tone frequency exchanges to generate phase-based ranging signals. The high-resolution, on-chip radio wave sampling provides high-quality IQ samples, which form the inputs for distance determination. Data processing algorithms then filter the data for noise, interference and reflections. This process outputs the shortest distance over-the-air signal path length, providing 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. It also comes equipped with a Bluetooth LE 5.1 compliant stack and software implementation, eliminating the need for hardware adaptations or an external host processor and ensuring co-existence between Bluetooth communications and the distance measurement process.

This all adds up to a solution that provides end-users with greater reliability, security, and location and tracking accuracy for the IoT devices in peer-to-peer applications.