SPARK Microsystems Unveils Its Second-Generation UWB Transceiver, the SR1120

Wireless communications specialist SPARK Microsystems has launched its second-generation ultra-wideband (UWB) chip, the SR1120 — claiming a "100x lower power ranging" than its direct competitors while delivering 40x the throughput of Bluetooth.

"Every engineer knows the pain of compromise with wireless transceivers — you get the speed but burn through power, or you save power but your latency suffers," says SPARK Microsystems chief executive officer Fares Mubarak of the problem his company set out to solve. "We built the SR1120 to bring an end to those compromises by hitting all the marks at once: high data rates, low power, minimal latency and a footprint small enough to fit anywhere. This is a fundamental shift in what wireless can do, going well beyond Bluetooth and Wi-Fi."

The SR1120 is a compact ultra-wideband (UWB) transceiver for high-throughput short-range communications, good for up to 41 megabits per second (Mbps) at a very low latency — down to 25µs airtime for 1kb, the company claims. Running on the 6.2–9.5GHz band, with symbol rates configurable as 20.48MHz, 27.31MHz, or 40.96MHz, the chip's communications can co-exist with cellular, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Wi-Fi on 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands.

Compared to the company's previous-generation offering, the chip delivers twice the peak data rate and extended range plus adds multi-antenna support. SPARK Microsystems also promises that the part is compliant with the IEEE 802.15.4ab physical layer standard for low-energy ultra-wideband communication. The chip includes SPI and quad-SPI interfaces, and can run on a 1.8–3.3VDC supply with a default configuration that sees it "aggressively duty-cycled" to deliver "orders of magnitude better energy efficiency compared to traditional IoT [Internet of Things] solutions."

For development, the company has launched an evaluation kit that places the transceiver on a daughterboard connecting to a development board hosting a STMicroelectronics STM32U5 microcontroller, with a single 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 160MHz, 2.5MB of static RAM (SRAM), and 4MB of flash storage. Elsewhere on the board is an Analog Devices MAX98091 audio digital to analog converter (DAC) with analog jacks and USB audio support, four user-programmable buttons and five LEDs, and a USB Type-C port for power and programming.

More information on the SR1120 is available on the SPARK Microsystems website; the company had not publicly disclosed pricing at the time of writing.