Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is the kind of blather I expect from business types without hardware experience.

The issue with NB-IoT right now is chicken vs egg.

NB-IoT stuff currently is limited to expensive modules.

Why? Because the carriers aren't rolling this out yet and when it is it's expensive. So, nobody is going to make a chip for it since the volume isn't going to be there for a while (Intel, for example, just pulled out of making NB-IoT chips). So, the badly integrated systems are going to be battery hungry and expensive, which means that the carriers don't see any volume and consequently don't feel the need to work very hard rolling it out.

Once the carriers finally get NB-IoT stuff universally deployed (even if it's expensive) then the silicon vendors will go to work on integrating everything into a single chip.

Once that happens, someone will say: "Hi, T-Mobile, I have 10 million devices I would like to activate and connect. Would you like to do this or should I go talk to Verizon, AT&T, etc." and the prices will come down.

This will follow the same trajectory as cellular data vs cellular voice.

Intel pulling out is far from a canary in the coal mine. The rest of your post is fairly accurate though!

Background: Intel has serious production issues with their latest 10nm process, meaning their x86 chips and LTE modems for Apple are filling most of their capacity to manufacture chips on the existing 14nm process. I doubt Intel has LTE modem designs that work on older processes, and NB-IOT being unproven, low volume and needing low power chips means it could really use the best process available. Thus, with no slack capacity to build chips, why spend engineering time on something you can't build in quantity?

If 10nm were usable, Intel would likely have numerous side projects filling their older 14nm fabs. Sadly this won't be the case for Intel anytime soon.

Actually, ultra-low power devices (ie months-/years-long battery life) are probably better suited for older technology nodes, say 40+ nm for bulk, or 22+ nm for SoI. Standby leakage power is going to be too high on the lower nodes. Lasting months/years on a coin cell means sub-1 uA standby combined with infrequent, short-lived wake cycles. There's no real way around this until you go to energy harvesting, and right now that's limited to very very low power, single-function devices.

Excellent post -- a rarely understood truth. For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX. But realistically the quiescent power drain still needs to be in the sub 5uW range to deliver long life on a small battery. A lot of GNSS and LTE SoC's standby in the 50uW range, which is just too much. Most of the LTE devices I've surveyed (M1, NB-IoT) are expected to be attached to MCUs, but they implement internally a small linux platform. Obviously, that makes it hard to get down to 5 uW.

> For low power wireless systems, still, though, the bulk of the energy is spent in TX and RX.

That is very highly dependent upon the system.

Some systems are all about leakage--these spend most of their lifetime on a shelf and a couple of days actually active.

Some systems are all about sensors or actuators and the communication is in the noise.

Some systems are all about calling home, and those require good TX consumption.

I am excited to see this come out:

https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/Low-Power-Cellular-I...

Seems promising, but I don't see the current consumption documented anywhere yet.

What will prompt carriers to roll this out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com