The industry’s first single-chip solution integrating on-chip processing, short-range UWB radar, and secure ranging capabilities is expected to enable new user experiences based on location, presence, and motion sensing in autonomous home and industrial IoT applications.

NXP Semiconductors today announced a single-chip solution, Trimension® SR250.

It is the industry's first single-chip solution that integrates on-chip processing capabilities, short-range ultra-wideband (UWB) radar, and secure ranging capabilities.

With this launch, NXP is taking another step forward in its work to enable a world where location, presence and motion sensing enable rich new user experiences that predict and automate across consumer and industrial IoT applications.

The Trimention SR250 combines low-power, short-range UWB radar operating at 6–8.5 GHz, secure ranging, and angle-of-arrival (AoA) calculations.

This enables new use cases based on UWB mapping, people or objects detection, and secure localization.

As a result, smart homes can provide convenience, efficiency, safety, and privacy.

Examples include turning lights and TVs on or off based on a user's presence, activating secure home access features, and monitoring the safety of a senior living alone without the need for cameras that could infringe on their privacy.

It also supports safety, security, and productivity applications in industrial environments, including tracking of personnel, goods, and asset locations, access control, collision avoidance, and hazardous area detection.

“The Trimention SR250 represents the next generation of NXP’s advanced UWB solutions and represents a giant leap towards a predictive and automated world,” said Philippe Dubois, senior vice president and general manager of Secure Transactions and Identity at NXP. “Its accurate, secure and energy-efficient sensing capabilities detect presence, motion and location and can unlock countless new user experiences. Customers across consumer and industrial IoT will benefit from the reduced power consumption and simplified design process of this industry-first solution.”

The Trimention SR250 is part of the industry’s broadest UWB portfolio, spanning devices across automotive, mobile and IoT applications. It supports 3D AoA, Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and provides accurate Time of Flight (ToF) measurements within ±5cm. For use cases requiring enhanced security, it can be combined with the EdgeLock SE051W Secure Element. The Trimention SR250 is built on the FiRa Consortium 3.0 technology standard to simplify authentication and ensure interoperability.

UWB secure ranging requires communication between two UWB-enabled devices for position or presence detection, whereas UWB radar is a passive solution that requires only a single-chip IC. The Trimention SR250 utilizes low-power radar operating at 6-8.5GHz to detect the presence, location, and even motions such as breathing or gestures of objects. It can also detect and track one or more people or objects when connected to a host processor running AI/ML algorithms, such as the i.MX family of applications processors, the RW61x family of wireless MCUs, or the MCX family of MCUs.

The Trimention SR250 integrates on-chip radar processing to autonomously perform radar processing and reduce overall system energy consumption. For example, while the host processor is in deep sleep mode, the Trimention SR250 can detect moving people or objects using on-chip presence detection. This on-chip processing is essential for autonomous home and industrial IoT functions. It also allows the system to take action, such as activating or deactivating heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) or autonomous robots when a user enters a designated area, such as a room in a smart home or a hazardous area in a smart factory.

The Trimention SR250 simplifies development and deployment with firmware, middleware, and sample applications. These include firmware with update support, APIs for the UWB Command Interface, updatable middleware including a C programming language API for radar operation, and example radar applications and algorithms.

NXP supports rapid development by providing an extensive ecosystem of partners, modules, and development kits.

The Trimention SR250 is currently sampling and is expected to be generally available through NXP’s extensive ecosystem of module partners in Q4 2024.