MediaTek Inc. will be conducting a series of interoperability tests of NarrowBand IoT connectivity (NB-IoT) with SoftBank Corp.
The tests are scheduled for the first quarter of 2018 to pave the way for development of NB-IoT commercial applications in Japan. This interoperability test will further efforts to advance MediaTek’s NB-IoT technology and ready the connectivity standard for global deployment.
Yoshitaka Sakurai, General Manager of MediaTek Japan, said: “This initiative with SoftBank, along with the unveiling of our MT2625 NB-IoT SoC solution and our collaboration with leading telecommunications companies around the world, demonstrates MediaTek’s commitment to an exciting new era that’s set to fuel the massive growth of the Internet of Things.”
The company recently unveiled its highly integrated and ultra-low-power MT2625 NB-IoT System-on-Chip (SoC) and announced its collaboration with China Mobile to build the world’s smallest NB-IoT module (16mm X 18mm) around the chipset.
The company’s MT2625 NB-IoT chipset is built to meet the requirements of cost-sensitive and small IoT devices. The MT2625 chipset leverages MediaTek’s advanced power consumption technology to enable IoT devices to work with batteries for years. The highly integrated SoC combines an Arm Cortex-M microcontroller (MCU), pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), flash memory and power management unit (PMU) into a small package to lower the cost of production while also speeding up time-to-market. The MT2625 supports a full frequency band (from 450MHz to 2.1GHz) of 3GPP R13 (NB1) and R14 (NB2) standards for a wide range of IoT applications including smart home control, logistics tracking and smart meters.