Spanish IoT antenna company Ignion was all smiles at last week’s Embedded World in Nuremberg following its recognition by the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator for its innovation and high business potential.

The win was awarded for the first miniaturised multi-radio chip antenna component tailored to IoT applications and the cloud-based digital-twin platform called Antenna Intelligence Cloud (AIC). Ignion was among 74 winners from a field of 1000 from 18 countries. The awards were based on a range of criteria including excellence, scale-up potential, level of risk and implementation.

“We are very happy with this award,” said Raquel Arribas, Ignion marketing and communications manager, at the show.

Ignion’s winning submission was antenna technology called Virtual Antenna, invented and patented by Ignion with over 53 granted patents in Europe, USA and China. Any Virtual Antenna component can work at any frequency from 698MHz to 10.6GHz and with protocols such as LTE-M, NB-IoT, GNSS, GPS, Wifi 6E, Wifi 7, Bluetooth, LoRa and other ISM.

“We developed the technology in 2015 and it has been deployed in 25 million devices worldwide,” said Arribas.

Because it is about ten times smaller than resonant antennas, the Virtual Antenna fits onto small footprint devices such as sensors and asset trackers. While the design process of standard antennas requires numerous physical prototypes, the electromagnetic behaviour of the Virtual Antenna can be accurately simulated via software, leading to easier, shorter and cheaper design processes.

Traditional resonant antennas can only be designed by electromagnetic experts, but the Virtual Antenna is designed so any electrical engineer or technology-savvy professional can use the technology in an IoT product.

The AIC uses simulation and machine learning to remove the need to initiate the development on physical hardware. It creates an IoT antenna digital twin providing users with guidance on how to implement and optimise their RF antenna design with predictability and flexibility. The platform is suitable for accelerating the design process as the design results are available within hours of submitting the requirements through the AIC portal.

“The field of entrants was extremely competitive led by deep tech start-ups that target societal challenges to sustainability,” said Mariya Gabriel, commissioner for innovation, research, culture, education and youth. “The superior level of innovation and creative problem solving was inherent in all the winning submissions.”