Nordic & Quuppa Partnership to expand Bluetooth Location Services Ecosystem
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Nordic and Quuppa's partnership will expand the ecosystem for beacon and tag makers among other applications based on location services
Nordic Semiconductor today announces a strengthening of its design partnership with Quuppa, an Espoo, Finland-based developer of real-time location service (RTLS) solutions. The increased collaboration builds on Quuppa’s development of its Intelligent Locating System to operate on Nordic’s nRF52 Series Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), including the latest Bluetooth5.1 Direction Finding solutions.
Quuppa’s previous long-term experience working with Nordic’s nRF52 Series architecture will enable the company to leverage Nordic’s Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding support to significantly extend the ecosystem of RTLS solution providers and applications based on the technology. Further expansion will be encouraged by Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding’s interoperability between products from different vendors and the next generation of smartphones. Key application sectors include asset tracking and indoor positioning systems (IPS).
Nordic’s recently launched nRF52811 SoC is one of the first Bluetooth 5.1-compatible commercial solutions and incorporates a powerful 64MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor which provides ample overhead for supervising both the Bluetooth RF software protocol and the RF profile positioning engine firmware.
In addition to the Arm processor, the Nordic nRF52811 SoC includes a multiprotocol 2.4GHz radio (featuring 4dBm output power with -97dBm sensitivity (at 1Mbps in Bluetooth LE mode)), 192kB Flash and 24kB RAM, and a wide range of analog and digital interfaces. The SoC is also a good choice for cost-constrained Bluetooth beacon applications requiring Bluetooth 5 technology’s extended range or employed as part of a Direction Finding system.
“For Quuppa it is exciting that Nordic Semiconductor SoCs are now enhanced with Bluetooth Direction Finding capabilities. The nRF52811 SoC fits perfectly into the Quuppa Ecosystem by coupling very low power consumption with a highly advanced radio, providing great value,” says Fabio Belloni, Chief Customer Officer at Quuppa.
“Because the introduction of Bluetooth 5.1 will rapidly expand the market for location services well beyond the beacons and tags we see today, we place high importance on our partnership with Quuppa, a leader in locating systems,” says Kjetil Holstad, Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “Combining our technologies offers developers a proven, commercialized platform which they can confidently use to build centimeter-precision RTLS solutions. And because Nordic has rapidly introduced a Bluetooth 5.1-compatible SoC-an architecture that perfectly complements Quuppa’s firmware-developers can start work on applications today.”
