Skip to main content

Decawave Investment Signals a Future of Location-Aware Electronics

Decawave announced recently a $30 Million investment, marking a huge push forward for location-based Internet of Things (IoT) products and solutions. The investment also underscores the growing strength of China in the manufacturing of location-aware electronics.
Decawave is a leading producer of chips and hardware components for ultra-wideband (UWB) radio, which is used for high accuracy localization of devices and tags, mainly in indoor settings. Decawave’s customers use Decawave chips to make a large variety of location-aware electronics. These electronic devices and appliances, including robots, drones, robotic cameras, shopping carts and more, use Decawave’s chips to measure their own locations as they move around indoor sites where GPS signals are not available.
Of the roughly 200 companies in the indoor location market, very few are selling localization technology in chip form that can be incorporated into electronic appliances. Most of the indoor location market is focused on solutions that can be deployed in sites or on smartphones. Decawave is positioned to dominate the market for chip-based localization.
The investment round was led by Atlantic Bridge Ventures, joined by West Summit CapitalACT VenturesZZ VenturesEnterprise Ireland and others. Several of the funds have ties to Ireland, where Decawave is based. Most significantly, West Summit and ZZ Ventures are based in China, and this investment round accompanies news that Decawave is opening a new office in Shenzen, China.
Decawave’s focus on China is important to understand. It does not mean that the target market for location-aware electronics products is the Chinese market. The target market is worldwide. But it does mean that a huge segment of manufacturers of cutting edge electronics are in China. Chinese manufacturers have demonstrated tremendous growth recently in bringing innovative electronics to market, including robots and drones, and are able to move from concept to manufacturing very fast, often within a year, compared to 2-3 years in many other countries.
Several of Decawave’s Chinese clients are reportedly developing robots and drones that automatically follow their user, or that navigate automatically from place to place. These actions require precise localization, either within a map of a site or relative to a user. Decawave’s UWB technology enables localization to an accuracy of 10-15cm, with a very fast update rate, as required for applications of this sort.
Decawave is not without competition in delivering accurate localization to the Internet of Things and electronics markets. Finland-based Quuppa recently introduced a hardware component product, called the Quuppa Tag Module, that enables their unique angle-of-arrival (AoA) technology to be embedded in electronic devices. Like UWB, Quuppa’s technology delivers localization to within 15-20cm, and is starting to be incorporated into third-party products in the Internet of Things market. But Decawave's technology is available in purely chip form with a wide range of deployment options.
Congratulations to Decawave on the investment. Congratulations to electronics manufacturers worldwide on having a stronger base from which to buy location-awareness. And to consumers worldwide interested in the next generation of location-aware electronics: just wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Popular posts from this blog

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements  at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

Robot Camera Foreshadows an Era of Location-Aware Electronics

A French company called Move 'N See produces a line of camera robots. Their devices act as a smart tripod, holding a video camera and automatically moving and zooming the camera as people of interest move around a site. The idea is simple but amazingly innovative. Photo selfies are easy to take, but video selfies are next to impossible. How can I video myself playing football or doing gymnastics, without setting the camera so far back as to be useless? Do spectators want to spend an entire sporting event carefully videoing their friend or relative moving around the field? Enter Move 'N See's "personal robot cameramen." Their devices aim, pan and zoom a video camera as one or more people move around an area. The people of interest wear armbands whose locations are tracked, enabling the camera controller to know where to aim the camera. The camera controller also includes enough smarts to adjust the camera smoothly and to capture multiple people evenly. T

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible.  I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving.  This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest.  (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States.  (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .)  So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions.  (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice.   (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what