Three wireless ways to go

In one of the many fine talks at the imec Technology Forum in Brussels this past week, Cees Links, the CEO of GreenPeak Technologies, noted that engineers should be careful with their selection of a wireless connection scheme to the infamous IoT. He said the fit band, smart home, smart meter, butler, and caretaker application areas are often very different use cases. Some need low power most of all, some need to move only a little data, etc.

There are three base connection methods – ZigBee, WiFi, and Bluetooth – and many variations on these baseline methods are available. The two charts that Cees showed give a nice overview of the playing field. We could summarize to say that ZigBee is very low power, WiFi is fast, and Bluetooth is short range with medium power and data rate.

Caption:  Three straight forward physical layers each have a number of options.

This chart is a bit hard to read because there is so much information here – but it is worth the effort. Wireless modules for 802.15.4 Zigbee, from GreenPeak and others, include 128-bit encryption. 

Caption:  The chart shows features vs type, with red shaded items things you may want to be concerned about.

One item not included on the second chart, is whether both the com module and transceiver IC have long term availability. Since your new product is going to be extremely popular for many years, you’ll need that.