“In just six years, Semtech’s LoRa Core™ product portfolio has driven changes in the global economy and environment. This technology provides new opportunities for innovation, inspiring businesses and individuals to create a better world.

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Author: Lu Tuofu, Chief Product Marketing Manager of Semtech

In just six years, Semtech’s LoRa Core™ product portfolio has driven changes in the global economy and environment. This technology provides new opportunities for innovation, inspiring businesses and individuals to create a better world.

Semtech’s LoRa Core™ is driving the development of many vertical industries, including utilities, agriculture, medical, factory automation and urban services. The application of LoRa Core products on the Internet of Things can simplify the operation process and save time and cost for enterprises and municipal departments.

What is LoRa Core?

In a nutshell, LoRa Core represents an essential capability for Semtech LoRa® devices to enable long-range, low-power, and end-to-end communication in the sub-GHz frequency band. The LoRa Core product portfolio consists of transceiver chips, gateway chips and reference designs. These include SX126x series, SX127x series and LLCC68 transceiver chips; SX130x series gateway chips; existing gateway reference designs and the new LoRa Corecell gateway reference design.

LoRa Core provides the building blocks for LoRaWAN® networks deployed around the world. The LoRa Core technology, which has been widely adopted, combined with the LoRaWAN protocol applied to low-power wide area networks, the success achieved is self-evident:

• Adopted by 148 network operators in over 99 countries and growing
• By the end of 2020, the number of global end node connections is expected to exceed 180 million

Key Advantages of LoRa Core-Based IoT Applications

LoRa Core, combined with Semtech’s LoRa Basics™ software building blocks, enables sensors to connect to a LoRaWAN network, enabling real-time data communication and analysis. LoRaWAN networks are easy to deploy, easily scalable, and cost-effective, making them the preferred connection method for IoT solutions.

This combination enables this type of network to securely connect thousands or hundreds of thousands of sensor devices that receive and transmit data at lower cost, with longer reach, and with cellular, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi Compared with other connection methods, it can significantly extend the life of the battery in the device.

Application scenarios of LoRa Core

This proven technology has been successfully used in hundreds of well-known application scenarios, including smart cities, smart homes and buildings, smart campuses, smart agriculture, supply chain and many others. Here are some examples of them:

smart meter

Get usage data remotely, replacing manual operations. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) can help water, gas, electricity and other utility users and municipalities improve efficiency and accelerate the pace of sustainable development.

Asset tracking

Convoys, cattle, and any other asset of value can be wirelessly tracked over long distances and with low power consumption, with automatic anomaly detection, geofencing and alarming.

Temperature and Humidity Detection

Monitor HVAC systems, food cold chains and workplace critical values ​​and receive notifications when field values ​​exceed pre-set thresholds.

leak detection

Connected sensors instantly detect undetected leaks and send notifications, providing actionable information for quick response and problem resolution.

precision irrigation

Deploying plug-and-play soil moisture sensing probes over large areas of farmland can provide accurate soil condition data to enable optimized irrigation schedules that reduce water usage while increasing yields.

New Coronary Pneumonia Epidemic Prevention and Control

During the prevention and control of the new coronavirus epidemic, LoRa devices are widely used in scenarios such as automatic body temperature detection, social distancing monitoring, contact tracing, and facility hygiene monitoring to ensure the safety of work and public places.

The future development direction of LoRa Core

Semtech’s founding principle of providing advanced technology with social and environmental benefits is now being fully embodied. IoT applications that take full advantage of LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol are helping our planet solve some of its biggest challenges, such as energy management, natural resource reduction, pollution control, and infrastructure efficiency.

Semtech will continue to develop and launch innovative technologies for its LoRa Core product portfolio. For example, the latest technologies have improved network functionality, eased congestion and made geolocation tracking more affordable.

Semtech released the LoRa Core gateway baseband processor SX1303 in January 2021, and the related LoRa Corecell gateway reference design that supports the “accurate timestamp” function. It enables gateways to perform network geolocation functions using Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA). Another example is the new LoRa Corecell gateway reference design (SX1302), which features “listen before talk” and spectrum scanning.