Satellite communications network developer Swarm Technologies has integrated fellow California company Semtech’s LoRa devices to enable two-way communications to and from its satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

“Because Semtech’s LoRa technology is well suited for long distance, low power and wide area coverage applications, it has opened up new internet of things use cases for Swarm in areas such as logistics, agriculture, connected cars and energy,” said Ben Longmier, CTO of Swarm. “We are thrilled to collaborate with Semtech by utilising LoRa to help us provide affordable global connectivity for IoT devices at an unprecedented scale.”

Swarm incorporates LoRa on VHF for uplink and downlink to its satellites from the ground. The network is commercially live, with 72 commercial satellites providing full global coverage.

Swarm plans to deploy 150 commercial satellites by the end of 2021, which are expected to bring latency times down to less than one minute. The user modems, which are integrated into IoT devices, communicate with the satellites, enabling reliable data transfer anywhere on Earth, at all times.

“Semtech and Swarm are working jointly to pursue commercial IoT applications that require less data-intensive communications and fill in the gaps of the existing satellite market,” said Marc Pegulu, vice president of Semtech. “The combination of our technologies helps provide reliable and affordable connectivity that keep sensors, equipment and assets connected across land and sea.”

Founded in 2016, Swarm provides a two-way satellite communications network. Its small satellites enable the company to provide network services and user hardware at low cost across a range of industries including maritime shipping, agriculture, energy and ground transportation. Swarm received commercial approval from the FCC to launch and operate its LEO satellite constellation in late 2019 and launched its first commercial satellites in September 2020.

• Semtech has announced a chipset for its LoRa Core portfolio. The portfolio provides global LoRaWan coverage and is targeted at several vertical industries including asset tracking, building, home, agriculture, metering and factory automation.

The portfolio consists of sub-GHz transceiver chips, gateway chips and reference designs including the SX126x, SX127x and LLCC68 transceiver chips, as well as the SX130x gateway chips, legacy gateway reference designs and the LoRa Corecell gateway reference designs.

Additions to the LoRa Core portfolio are a gateway baseband processor integrated with LoRa (SX1303) and an associated LoRa Corecell gateway reference design that supports the fine timestamp feature.

“The new LoRa Core gateway IC enables the network-centric geolocation of LoRa devices without requiring the inclusion of GPS hardware at each individual end node,” said Pedro Pachuca, director of wireless products at Semtech. “Based on a fine timestamp capability that provides accurate time of arrival information for each demodulated message, the new chipset allows gateways to perform network-centric geolocation based on time difference of arrival. This is ideal for several cost-sensitive asset-tracking applications. The new LoRa Core IC helps customers accelerate the development of their applications operating the LoRaWan protocol.”

The LoRa Corecell gateway reference design, with fine timestamp, is available for US, Europe and China regions.