Semtech Releases LoRa Basics™ to Accelerate IoT Applications

Semtech Corporation (Nasdaq: SMTC), a leading supplier of high-performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products and advanced algorithms, recently announced the official launch of LoRa Basics™ software building blocks to help solution developers quickly achieve the return on investment (ROI) expected by their customers. All LoRa Basics versions will be available as open source files on Semtech's LoRa Developer Portal.

 “To bring LoRa®-based solutions to market faster, developers can take advantage of Semtech’s free, supported and easy-to-use LoRa Basics kit,” said Steven Hegenderfer, Senior Director of Developer Ecosystem for Semtech’s Wireless Sensing and Products Group. “LoRa Basics is fully compatible with the LoRa Alliance™ and enables developers and enterprises to quickly develop their applications.”

The driving force behind LoRa Basics is to extract common LoRaWAN® functions that all developers of end devices, gateways or LoRaWAN-based solutions must implement, and provide a set of specification-compatible, free, and supported open source software suites. This set of building blocks represents the best practices for LoRaWAN-based technology implementations. This allows developers to focus on developing their solutions while bringing applications to market faster and at a lower cost.

 “There is a real need in the IoT market to simplify the development of IoT solutions and accelerate deployment,” said Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of IoT analyst firm Beecham Research. “LoRa Basics brings a welcome new dimension to the market, and we believe it will help achieve this goal and help developers focus more on new value-added opportunities.”

The first basic software building block, LoRa Basics™ Station, was announced and released simultaneously on GitHub in January 2019. LoRa Basics Station is a new LoRaWAN-based gateway packet forwarder with secure and reliable data communication and remote gateway management protocol that is equally suitable for Linux®-based gateways and resource-constrained embedded gateways.

The second basic building block, LoRa Basics MAC, was released today and provides the firmware needed for end-device developers to enable and run a LoRaWAN-based radio. In addition to being fully compliant with the LoRaWAN protocol, it also provides an event-driven runtime with power management, timer handling, and a flexible simulation environment to facilitate debugging and regression testing.

Future areas of focus for the LoRa Basics suite include firmware over-the-air (FUOTA) upgrades on both end devices and backend servers, and a data science notebook for offline performance analysis.

 “As a long-time ASIC and electronic design services provider and leading manufacturer of wireless IoT products and systems, Miromico is always looking for better tools and methods to develop new products faster, easier and more reliably. Semtech’s new LoRa Basics suite brings extensive improvements and many sought-after features to LoRa-based nodes and gateways in one major leap forward,” said Marcel Wappler, Head of IoT and LPWAN at Miromico. “LoRa Basics Mac is a carefully crafted, state-of-the-art Gen2.0 open source LoRaWAN protocol with many advantages over previous protocols: greatly improved software quality and portability, significantly reduced memory footprint, separation of bootloader and application, and new tools for simulation and automated testing of functionality and compatibility. These advantages will enable Miromico to bring new, innovative IoT products to market faster, easier, more reliably and more cost-effectively.”