A new wireless positioning company, PHY Wireless, recently announced its separation from its parent company, Acorn Technologies.
PHY Wireless said in a statement that it can benefit from the separation by becoming a pure play provider of accurate mobile positioning algorithms for carriers, chip makers, IoT module manufacturers and application service providers.
PHY Wireless, based in La Jolla, California, has a positioning and location intelligence portfolio called hellaPHY that it described as “truly scalable and low cost.” The company’s algorithms are designed to allow for positioning to be device-based “with next to no network interaction, thereby reducing power dramatically and thus extending battery life.”
The technology can scale for all types of user equipment and supports E911 requirements. Both hardware and software versions of its algorithms are available.
Vice President Steven Caliguri said the technology has been engineered for a very small footprint, requiring the least network resources and device power. “This will allow IoT module makers and wireless chip makers to meet the aggressive targets for LPWA [Low-Power Wide-Area] IoT solutions in terms of cost, power and performance.”
Sequans Communications, an LTE chip and module provider, licensed the hellaPHY intellectual property in 2016. HellaPHY targets LTE but is applicable to any OFDM protocol.
Precise device location will be more important for data privacy, Acorn CEO Tom Horgan told EE Times. “We are able to secure not only the position calculation but also the location of the device,” he said. “So each device has a very secure location of its own, unlike what might be in a cloud implementation where many device locations would be stored and could possibly be hacked with a single intrusion versus the million required to hack each individual IoT device.
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