Today Samsung announced a new brand, Exynos Connect, which consolidates all of its short-range wireless communication solutions such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband (UWB) under one ‘roof’.
At the same time, the company has unveiled its first ever UWB chipset, the Exynos Connect U100. Its naming is very close to Apple’s U1 chip which is powering its AirTag object tracker, and we assume that’s not a coincidence.
Samsung’s solution comes with distance measurement capabilities that are accurate to within single-digit centimeters and under five degrees, and it’s optimized for use in mobile, automotive, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for which it offers precise distance and location information. Since it integrates radio frequency, baseband, embedded flash memory and power management IP into a single chip, the U100 is ideal for use in compact devices.
The U100 leverages time of arrival (ToA) and 3D angle of arrival (AoA) measurements to provide the aforementioned level of accuracy. Samsung says this makes it especially useful when tracking location indoors as well as for AR and VR applications that require exact and real-time tracking of moving people.
The chip has a power saving mode, and it’s equipped with a scrambled timestamp sequence (STS) function and a secure hardware encryption engine to prevent external hacking. The Exynos Connect U100 has been certified by the FiRa Consortium for interoperability with UWB standards. It also complies with the Car Connectivity Consortium’s Digital Key Release 3.0, allowing U100-equipped smartphones to securely communicate digital keys with vehicles.
It’s unclear when we’ll see the first devices to have this chip built-in, but we assume Samsung itself will make good use of it across product categories.
