LTE for IoT chipmaker Sequans Communications debuted Wednesday Monarch SX, a highly integrated system-on-chip that combines Sequans’ IoT optimized Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT platform with a low-power ARM Cortex-M4 processor, low-power sensor hub, graphics display controller, and media processing engine, all in one compact package of less than 90 square millimeters.
Monarch SX is designed to streamline the development of numerous types of IoT devices, including trackers, wearables, sensors, utility meters, and other smart home and city applications.
Based on Sequans’ Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT platform with baseband, RF, RAM and power management, and integrating, it includes ARM Cortex-M4 processor; media processing engine for audio and voice applications, including support for VoLTE on LTE-M; low-power sensor hub; GPU and display controller; IoT interfaces for USB, screen, microphone, battery, GNSS, SIM card, secure element, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, keyboard, accelerometer, gyroscope, and other sensors; with a single chip FC-CSP package.
“We’ve taken our industry-leading Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT chip platform and integrated it—on a single piece of silicon—with the processing power needed for some of the most popular IoT applications of today,” said Georges Karam, Sequans CEO. “Monarch SX eliminates the need for adding external processors to run IoT applications supporting voice, music, graphics display, sensor or location data collection. Furthermore, all of Monarch SX’s integrated components are highly optimized for power efficiency, enabling LTE-M or NB-IoT applications to run for many years on very small batteries and deliver industry-leading price/performance capability.”
“We built Monarch SX for our IoT device maker customers, understanding what they want to build and the functionality they want to incorporate in their designs,” said Karam. “Because of its high integration level, Monarch SX is ideal for the smallest of IoT devices where space is at a premium—wearables, trackers, and all types of sensors—and, because of its powerful integrated processors, it’s also ideal for smart IoT devices.”
Sequans Communications recently announced a collaboration with STMicroelectronics, to facilitate the hardware and software combination of ST’s STM32 microcontroller platform with Sequans’ Monarch LTE-M chipset platform in a design kit for IoT connectivity.
The IoT design kit simplifies device design and speeds time to market for makers of connected IoT devices, including wearables, connected healthcare devices, smart city and smart home devices, asset trackers, and agriculture and industrial IoT devices.
The STM32 family is the ARM Cortex-M-core 32‑bit microcontroller platform comprising ten product series addressing a large range of applications. The family spans ultra-low-power STM32L products to the world’s highest performance STM32H7 series and offers binary compatibility combined with similar pinout assignments, hardware IP proliferation, and a consistent higher-level programming language that simplifies development across the STM32 families.
