Taoglas, a provider of IoT and M2M antenna products, recently launched a family of small-form-factor ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas designed to enable centimeter-level positioning and angle-of-arrival applications. This includes asset tracking, follow-me drones, healthcare monitoring, smart home services, and other applications that demand high-performance indoor localization capabilities. The antennas offer high efficiencies across a wide spectrum of frequency bands from 3 to 10 GHz.

Indoor wireless positioning has long been hampered by technologies that were not designed for this purpose, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and assisted GPS. UWB is a low-power digital wireless technology that increases location precision and range while transmitting large amounts of data short distances over a wide spectrum of frequency bands. UWB’s low-power requirements offer increased battery life of sensors and tags, leading to reduction in overall operational costs.

Taoglas’ range of UWB antennas features both flexible and rigid PCB embedded units, as well as UWB embedded SMT chip antennas. The flexible FXUWB antennas were developed using a simple “peel and stick” assembly process, attaching securely to non-metal surfaces with a flexible micro-coaxial cable mounting. The chip antennas are designed to be surface mounted directly onto a PCB. The UWB antennas can be used with the DecaWave DW1000 chip, and are also compatible with other UWB sensor modules.

eletter-09-06-2017