Qualcomm's Peanut targets body area networks
Ultra-low power radio technology could go step further than low power Bluetooth
Published: 23 September, 2010
READ MORE: Qualcomm | Medical/Health | Bluetooth
The market for ultra-low power wireless technologies, for short range networks, is overcrowded, but Qualcomm is creating yet another contender to go alongside Bluetooth, ZigBee, UltraWideBand and Z-Wave. This one is less about personal area networks than pushing power levels even lower, eventually targeting 'body area networks'.
Qualcomm's project is called Peanut, and the firm's SVP of R&D, Matt Grob, said it could be used over distances from a few inches to the length of a room. "It would require fractions of a milliwatt of power but move data at high speed," he told the EmTech@MIT 2010 conference. Those speeds would be a "few Mbps" for data, voice and audio, and it could probably handle video too.
The Peanut radio has been under development at Qualcomm for four years, and needs another year to be commercially ready. Since it has lower power consumption even than the new low power Bluetooth standard (which uses the WiBree system developed at Nokia) it could be applied to a range of new uses. Target markets include industrial control - ZigBee's stronghold, but promising to support emerging M2M functions that need to transmit more data than current systems, while preserving long battery life. Monitoring devices would also be important, and fall into the healthcare market in which Qualcomm has taken such an interest in recent years. This would take it into the realm of body area networks, which rely on tiny monitors and sensors attached to the user, or eventually even embedded in them.
Grob also described an application for the automotive industry - devices for reducing driver distraction by creating a wireless network surrounding a driver, but not the passengers. This would prevent the driver being diverted by calls or engaging in texting.
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