BRUSSELS—The Imec research institute (Leuven, Belgium) has designed an SoC integrating support for five low power wide area (LPWA) networks for the Internet of Things. Separately, it struck a deal to collaborate with Infineon Technologies AG on the design of a CMOS-based 79 GHz radar chip for cars, it announced at its annual Imec Technology Forum here.

Imec claims its LPWA chip—co-developed with the Holst Center, a sister institute in the Netherlands—is the most integrated and lowest cost of its kind to date. The chip supports five nets that run in the 780-930 MHz ISM band and are geared for smart meters or smart cities—802.15.4g/k, LoRa, KNX-RF, Sigfox and Wireless M-Bus.

The SoC includes an RF front end, power management, an unidentified ARM core, 160 Kbytes SRAM and peripherals. It consumes just 8 milliWatts in receive mode and 113mW while transmitting at 13.5 dBm output power.

The chip has a -120 dBm sensitivity at 0.1% BER at 1 Kbit/second and a 105 dB dynamic range. Output power can be controlled at levels ranging from less than -40 dBm to 15 dBm.