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I'm actually building a product that incorporates a CC1350 in it, which is the variant that has both a 2.4 GHz and a proprietary sub-1GHz radio. These chips ar

I'm actually building a product that incorporates a CC1350 in it, which is the variant that has both a 2.4 GHz and a proprietary sub-1GHz radio. These chips are totally amazing. TI used every trick in the book to help the designers save power. There's even a specialized coprocessor that uses special low leakage silicon to handle some simple 16 bit I/O processing so you don't have to wake up the main processor, and the main Cortex-M3 is pretty darn low power already. I am kind of annoyed that you have to call into their ROM routines to use the radio, though. The datasheet is a snarky little tease that says ha ha, the radio registers are somewhere around these addresses but we aren't going to tell you what they do! Shhhh it's a secret! This is particularly annoying because I could make my life a lot simpler if I could interface with the Nordic shockburst protocols, and TI's firmware only knows how to speak TI simplelink packet formats. The thing that TI isn't talking about is that they did some stuff around the voltage regulation that looks like they were planning on pushing some kind of energy harvesting companion silicon. It's just a guess, but they might announce something in the future along those lines. Whoever ends up first to market with a productized energy harvesting IoT chip is going to print bucketloads of money. There's also a lot of stuff going on in the low power LTE space right now. Altair semi announced the 1250 chip, which is -- get this -- power competitive with the TI chip for low frequency telemetry applications. AT&T and Verizon have already launched their cat-M1 networks and cat-NB1 is going to be out by the beginning of next year. Those protocols use oversampling and a bunch of other mad scientist RF hacks to get even more range than the LTE radio in your phone. The bandwidth is really low, like modem or ISDN low, but there's a ton of applications that can be implemented with literally one bit per day worth of data. The chips are getting pumped out in volume now, and the cost regime is actually causing revenue jitters at the carriers. They want to squeeze some extra revenue out of LTE IoT space since it's basically free for them to implement since the LTE IoT designers figured out how to reuse the otherwise useless guard bands surrounding the real full-fat LTE signals your phone uses. However, it's kind of a tough problem to figure out a cost model where customers are paying something like $10 a year for maybe hundreds of devices that are so cheap that the most expensive item on the board is the SIM card. And even that's going away in the 2nd generation IoT chips now that someone figured out how to get around the UICC requirement for provisioning by doing something funny with a protected element in the main LTE radio. Also check out my profile. It's not a joke, someone made a homebrew monitoring solution out of someone else's IoT chip to keep track of cow farts because they wanted to adjust the feed based on farts per minute or something, I didn't really understand it.

keithnz 9y ago
we do ( http://outpostcentral.com http://outpostcentral.com / http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ ) GSM based monitoring. We had mesh tech at one stage, but pretty much stick to GSM these days. LTE IoT bands are starting to be viable as it gets rolled out. Our battery tech can get quite a number of years. SIM costs are tiny these days ( for us at least ).
- dboreham 9y ago
  Devices don't need actual SIMs these days (e.g. my Samsung watch doesn't have one). Do they still need the chip that's on the SIM? (hence no major cost savings)?
  - trelliscoded 9y ago
    They never needed it from a technical perspective, it's there to make provisioning easier. Because the carriers were pretty decoupled from the baseband ecosystem, there wasn't a really good way to get the subscriber keys into the radio hardware unless the carrier stuck their nose in the supply chain somehow. Because baseband vendors all hate each other, there wasn't a lot of interest in cooperating to create a standard to do something like that. Plus, Gemalto kept trying to throw monkey wrenches into the committees by doing some quite frankly pretty messed up things. Regardless, profit is important and someone had to get squeezed out of the BoM of these things being manufacturing in the billions. It finally happened because of a combination of improvements to system on chip security, CMs cracking down on security, and the carriers hauling their EDI based provisioning systems into the 21st century. As a result, carriers can now securely provision devices after manufacturing. AT&T is kind of a jerk about it though, they do some stuff to the SIM when you onboard an unlocked device sometimes to tie it to their network. I'm still not entirely clear how the keys get distributed in a SIMless world though. The process I use to onboard stuff into Verizon's IoT cloud involves me uploading a CSV file to a server somewhere and making some REST requests, but it's just IMSIs. The virtual UICC in the products like your watch works pretty much the same way, according to my chip vendor. But they have a multicarrier solution where the virtual UICC already knows about the major networks, so maybe they're exchanging keys as part of the OTA activation flow and securing it with a hardware key they give to the carriers in a HSM or something. Or maybe the manufacturers are getting HSMs at the factory and doing it right in the manufacturing process. I tried to wrap my head around the 3GPP documents on the subject and I just got more and more confused. There's definitely a vendor proprietary aspect to what's going on though, because I can see the OTA provisioning packets in QXDM and it says it doesn't know how to decode them.

keithnz 9y ago

we do ( http://outpostcentral.com http://outpostcentral.com / http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ ) GSM based monitoring. We had mesh tech at one stage, but pretty much stick to GSM these days. LTE IoT bands are starting to be viable as it gets rolled out. Our battery tech can get quite a number of years. SIM costs are tiny these days ( for us at least ).

dboreham 9y ago
Devices don't need actual SIMs these days (e.g. my Samsung watch doesn't have one). Do they still need the chip that's on the SIM? (hence no major cost savings)?
- trelliscoded 9y ago
  They never needed it from a technical perspective, it's there to make provisioning easier. Because the carriers were pretty decoupled from the baseband ecosystem, there wasn't a really good way to get the subscriber keys into the radio hardware unless the carrier stuck their nose in the supply chain somehow. Because baseband vendors all hate each other, there wasn't a lot of interest in cooperating to create a standard to do something like that. Plus, Gemalto kept trying to throw monkey wrenches into the committees by doing some quite frankly pretty messed up things. Regardless, profit is important and someone had to get squeezed out of the BoM of these things being manufacturing in the billions. It finally happened because of a combination of improvements to system on chip security, CMs cracking down on security, and the carriers hauling their EDI based provisioning systems into the 21st century. As a result, carriers can now securely provision devices after manufacturing. AT&T is kind of a jerk about it though, they do some stuff to the SIM when you onboard an unlocked device sometimes to tie it to their network. I'm still not entirely clear how the keys get distributed in a SIMless world though. The process I use to onboard stuff into Verizon's IoT cloud involves me uploading a CSV file to a server somewhere and making some REST requests, but it's just IMSIs. The virtual UICC in the products like your watch works pretty much the same way, according to my chip vendor. But they have a multicarrier solution where the virtual UICC already knows about the major networks, so maybe they're exchanging keys as part of the OTA activation flow and securing it with a hardware key they give to the carriers in a HSM or something. Or maybe the manufacturers are getting HSMs at the factory and doing it right in the manufacturing process. I tried to wrap my head around the 3GPP documents on the subject and I just got more and more confused. There's definitely a vendor proprietary aspect to what's going on though, because I can see the OTA provisioning packets in QXDM and it says it doesn't know how to decode them.