Dialog’s Wireless Ranging (WiRa) SDK enhances the DA1469x family of Bluetooth LE SoCs with new, highly accurate and reliable distance measurement capabilities. Current market offerings fall short due to radio signal strength indicator (RSSI), a flawed measure that’s sensitive to radio signal blockages. Unlike RSSI, the WiRa SDK uses radar-like implementation to greatly enhance distance measurement for connected devices, amounting to +/- 0.5 meters in typical situations. The result is a solution with 10x the accuracy of competing RSSI-based localization options.

The WiRA SDK’s 2.4 GHz radio interweaves Bluetooth low energy data packets with constant tone frequency exchanges to generate phase-based ranging signals. The high-resolution, on-chip radio wave sampling provides high quality IQ samples, which form the inputs for distance determination. Data processing algorithms then filter the data for noise, interference and reflections. This process outputs the shortest distance over-the-air signal path length, providing the application with a distance measurement value to use.

The WiRa SDK leverages the existing DA1469x wireless MCU family – including its ARM® Cortex®-M33 application processor, M0+-based baseband processor and best-in-class radio performance – to provide distance measurements from a single chip. It also comes equipped with a Bluetooth LE 5.1 compliant stack and software implementation, eliminating the need for hardware adaptations or an external host processor and ensuring co-existence between Bluetooth communications and the distance measurement process.

This all adds up to a solution that provides end users with greater reliability, security, and location and tracking accuracy for the IoT devices in peer-to-peer applications.