RF-star today rolled out its BLE module portfolio based on TI’s new CC2340 wireless microcontrollers (MCU) that enable high-quality Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) modules much cheaper than the competing devices. Featuring top-ranking standby current and radio-frequency (RF) performance, the Bluetooth LE CC2340 modules are positioned for ultra-low power wireless applications, such as smart homes, medical devices, industrial sensors, and automobiles (like EV chargers and PEPS) at a lower price, making them affordable for engineers to add Bluetooth LE connectivity modules to more products. According to the 2023 Bluetooth Market Update released by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), ABI Research anticipates a higher growth in the Bluetooth market over the next five years. By 2027, 7.6 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will be shipping annually, representing a nine percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Driven by continued strong growth in peripheral devices, Bluetooth® LE single-mode device shipments are forecasted to more than double over the next five years. Figure 1 Single-Mode Bluetooth® LE Device Growth (numbers in billions) It follows that Bluetooth LE technology is still all the rage. As one of the Bluetooth SIG members, Texas Instruments is dedicated to Bluetooth technology to meet the growing demands for enhanced wireless connectivity in a wider range of applications. Last year, TI announced its fourth-generation Bluetooth LE Wireless MCUs, which is the CC2340 family featured with best-in-class standby current and ultra-low power radio-frequency (RF) performance. The CC2340 device family provides a highly integrated wireless connectivity function with support for Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy, ZigBee, and proprietary 2.4GHz protocols. So far, the family has two latest ultra-low power additions: CC2340R5 and CC2340R2. The CC2340R2 MCU provides 256 KB Flash, 28 KB SRAM, and 12 I/O pads, while the advanced version ― CC2340R5 offers an in-system programmable flash of 512 KB, an ultra-low leakage SRAM of 36 KB, and up to 26 I/O pads. Additionally, both of them share the same MCU architecture to support OTA and a wide selection of peripherals communication interfaces such as UART, SPI, I2C, timer, temperature sensor, battery monitor, analog comparator, and ADC analog-to-digital converter, etc. Based on TI’s new-level wireless MCUs, RF-star CC2340 modules with high-quality RF and power performance will have a broad range of wireless connectivity applications, such as smart homes, medical, industrial sensors, and automobiles. Figure 2 CC2340R5 module series Let’s have a quick preview of the irresistible features of RF-star CC2340 modules. CC2340 Modules with High-Quality RF and Power Performance at An Affordable Price The CC2340 BLE modules have an industry-leading standby current of less than 710 nA, which is 40% lower than competing devices. Up to 10 years of service life on a coin cell battery can be ...

SASKATOON, Saskatchewan, Canada, Jul. 31, 2023 / For Immediate Release/ -- RF-star, a leader in wireless modules and IoT Radio Frequency solutions in China, announced today the relocation of its corporate headquarters to Podium Building No. A-12 in Nanshan district, Shenzhen, Guangdong to advance the operations and growth of the company. Figure1 RF-star's New Workplace in Shenzhen The celebration of move-in was held on Jul. 26, 2023. Texas Instruments, SEKORM, and many other partners brought flowers and presents to congratulate RF-star on its housewarming. Figure2 Flowers and Presents from RF-star Partners The corporate new office is in Room 502-503, Podium Building No. A-12, Shenzhen Bay Science and Technology Ecological Park, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Expanding to 8,000 square feet at Shenzhen Bay Science and Technology Ecological Park in 2023, and 3,000 square feet at the Global Center in Chengdu in 2022, each location is a substantial upgrade from the Company's prior offices and will provide the necessary infrastructure for the corporate to continue to build on its current momentum and sales in Chinese and International markets. “We are greatly pleased for our partners to be here today to celebrate this housewarming with RF-star staff. Founded in 2010, in the past 13 years, RF-star has witnessed glorious moments and also encountered various uncontrollable factors during the epidemic. Although there are hardships in the progress, they don’t affect our sustainable development,” said Ben Qiu, GM of RF-star. “Thank you all for your support and our employees for their joint efforts, so that we can stand on this today and create a more brilliant moment together.” At last, he wished RF-star business to flourish like Bamboo to start its new journey and create a new future! Figure3 RF-star Leaders Snapshot King Kang, CEO of RF-star, says: “It is my regret that I could not witness the relocation of RF-star headquarters with you, but I can still enjoy the housewarming celebration online in Canada. Many thanks to all partners, customers and staff, the consistent development and growth of RF-star are absolutely inseparable from you.” Kang states: “In just a few years, our subsidiaries and branches in Canada, Chengdu, and Suzhou were established successively, and we will witness more new branches of RF-star in the future. As a pioneer in the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) area, RF-star with the vision of “Wireless Creates Infinite Possibilities”, has engaged itself in empowering different industries. We are willing to set up a better team to support our development and be cooperating with you to create a more intelligent society.” About RF-star Shenzhen RF-star Technology Co., Ltd. (RF-star) is a leading supplier of wireless RF solutions and low-power modules with an excellent industry reputation and credibility. As the official third-party IDH of Texas Instruments for more than a decade and a trusted partner for customers worldwide,...

Recently, RF-star, a veteran wireless IoT company in China, announced that it has joined hands with Texas Instruments to launch several Wi-SUN products, focusing on the development of wide-area mesh, hoping to provide customers with integrated solution development environment of end-edge-cloud in the field of industrial IoT and public facilities. The products disclosed by the company include a variety of Wi-SUN communication modules based on the TI CC1352 and CC1312 series, which support Sub1G multi-band and 2.4GHz communication, and support self-organizing networks by mesh and multi-hop. The distance of a single hop can reach several kilometers. Development history of Wi-SUN Even for most people in the IoT circle, Wi-SUN is a new technology. Actually it has been created for more than a dozen years. However it floated only in recent years after more major chip vendors and device manufacturers joined the technology alliance and started to promote the technology. As early as 2008, there was no unified wireless communication standard for the Wide Area network in the industry, while there were various wireless communication protocols in the industry at that time. What these protocols have in common is that they adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. But they still cannot achieve interconnection in the application layer. In order to solve this complex problem, Wi-SUN FAN (Wireless Utility Field Area Network), a large-scale wireless mesh network based on IP technology came into being. The standard is committed to becoming the global wireless mesh network standard with interoperability. With the implementation of the standard, Wi-SUN alliance was established in 2012. Currently, the alliance has more than 250 members worldwide, including Cisco, ARM, Texas Instruments and Itron, etc. Over the past two years, the Wi-SUN standard has matured, and hundreds of millions of Wi-SUN enabled devices have been deployed worldwide. It is widely used in public utilities and smart city facilities due to its feature of enabling smart meters, smart street lights and other devices to be connected to a public network. Wi-SUN technology is an open specification based on IEEE 802.15.4g, IEEE 802 and IETF IPv6 standard protocols. Wi-SUN FAN is a mesh network protocol that support self organizing and self-healing functions. Each device in the network can communicate with its neighbors, and signals can be transmit to each node in the mesh, making very long range hops in between. Wi-SUN features long distance transmission, security, high scalability, interoperability, easy deployment, mesh network, as well as low power consumption (the battery life of Wi-SUN modules has a chance to It can be used for ten years). It is widely used in smart meters and family intelligent energy management (HEMS) controllers for communication, and is also conducive to building a wide-area large-scale internet of things. The Wi-SUN standard mainly consists of two sub-specifications, namely FAN and HAN. ...

Time zipped by and the bell for the year 2022 is about to ring. At this beautiful moment of bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new, RF-star held the Annual Banquet for 2021 at Chengdu where all staff gathered together to celebrate the achievements made in 2021 and expect a bright outlook for 2022. In the past year of 2021, RF-star has made numerous achievements and continues to develop in the IoT industry, which enables itself to be more professional and creative in wireless technology. Before the activities, each department leader made a report on their work for 2021. Then the chairman of the board, Mr.Kang Kai, made an achievement and progress summary of RF-star. He also talked about the company's annual sales achievements, which far exceeded initial expectations and mentioned the outlook for 2022, including several plans such as doubling overall sales in 2021 and expanding and relocating the Chengdu branch. Every success and progress of RF-star will not be possible without the support and help from everyone! After the Chairman’s speech, it comes to the award ceremony. The company awarded more than 20 awards to some outstanding staff, including the most excellent staff in 2021, sales champion award, the most outstanding team award and so on. Many young employees stepped onto the award-winning stage. They show the charming demeanor of RF-star young employees! After the award ceremony, all the staff moved to the hotel and share the banquet. During the banquet, the company held raffle draw activity and fun games, which brings endless rousing cheers and claps, also pushes the activity to its climax. The year 2022 is a new start for RF-star! With the enhancement of overall arrangements of the company, 2022 will be a more rapid development period. “Inclusive all-win and shape the future”. We have confident belief and wonderful wishes to keep close cooperation with all our customers to shape a better future!

The IoT technology is constantly updated and iterated, and the indoor positioning technology has also undergone earth-shaking changes. From room-level positioning, decimeter-level positioning to high-precision centimeter positioning, the evolution of technology is always unexpected! Various positioning technologies of indoor positioning solutions appear in turn. Which technology is most suitable for indoor positioning? Let’s take a comprehensive perspective to understand the Bluetooth indoor positioning solution. Overview of Beacon Indoor Positioning Technology There are two Beacon indoor positioning technologies: 1. Passive location: Use the Bluetooth gateway to capture the broadcast data transmitted by the beacon on the person/object. The gateway is deployed and installed in the environment. And the gateway will return the collected beacon data to the server through the network. The server obtains the real-time position coordinates of the beacon through a positioning algorithm based on the coordinates known by the gateway. 2. Active position: Use the APP on a mobile device to get the Beacon broadcast data. The APP will have a positioning algorithm. Based on Beacon broadcast data, we can know the person's location who holds the mobile device. The location and navigation in the room are realized through APP or Applet, which is suitable for shopping malls, parking lots, and hospitals. Features of Beacon indoor positioning technology Compared with Wi-Fi positioning technology, Beacon technology suffers less environmental interference. Beacon product is based on the battery power supply. With the advantages of Bluetooth low energy consumption, long service life, small size, and the high penetration rate of Beacon devices, Bluetooth positioning is the most commonly used technology in indoor positioning technology. In daily life, smartphones and smart speakers support Bluetooth. The popularity and mass use of Bluetooth makes Bluetooth chips at a low price. And the BLE price is lower than traditional UWB/RFID solutions. How does Bluetooth realize indoor positioning? The Bluetooth working frequency is 2400 MHz ~ 2483.5 MHz. When Bluetooth initiates a broadcast, in addition to its own MAC address, the strength of the Bluetooth signal will also be broadcasted, namely RSSI information. The RSSI reflects the signal strength of the broadcast data packet. According to the RSSI, when the Bluetooth receiver is closer to the transmitter, the signal strength is stronger, on the contrary, will be weaker. The relationship between the signal strength and the distance from the transmitter can be found through the transformation of signal strength. By deploying a Bluetooth transmitter in the room, namely a beacon, the Bluetooth receiver can determine its indoor location after receiving the RSSI signal broadcasted by the transmitter. This positioning method is called active positioning, and the positioning accuracy is 3 meters to 4 meters. Through a reasonable algorith...

RF-star Chengdu team has traveled to the Western Sichuan Plateau in July. The impressive natural landscapes with snow-covered mountains, endless grass landscapes, countless yak herds, and local monasteries leave us literally speechless! 

When the moon hangs in the sky, we know that the Mid-Autumn Festival is around the corner. With the strong sweet-scent of the osmanthus was waved to us by the breeze in the streets and lanes in Chengdu city, the Mid-Autumn Festival is coming. On the occasion of the festival, RF-star would like to give you our best wishes here for a happy holiday. And on this special day, all staff of RF-star gathered here to participate in the lantern riddles and mooncake cooking activities to celebrate for the coming traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Let’s enjoy this happiness and rejoice together. Years come and go, but the moon in the Mid-Autumn night remains in our hearts forever. Guessing lantern riddles is a traditional folkloric entertainment activity for the Chinese. There is infinite wisdom and fun in the little riddles. From the animal names to the names of the objects, from the person names and place names to the rivers or mountains, everything can be included in the riddles and be a question or answer, which makes the riddle bring infinite extreme fun. Look, the activity has not begun yet, everyone is eager to have a try and some people roll up their sleeves to get ready to be the first person who gives the answer. With the host announced the kickoff of the activity, one after another answer being called out with the intermingled cheers and laughter, which pushes the activity to its climax. As the guessing riddles activity comes to an end, the host unveiled to move on to another activity named ”making mooncakes”. All staff brims with full of happiness and rejoice. Sweet-style mooncakes are one of the popular styles of mooncake for Chengdu people. Take one portion from each 3 colours of dough and combine them into a round. Flatten out the dough and center the filling. Seal and shape into a ball. Lightly coat the surface with prepared cooked glutinous rice flour. Press each into mooncake mould and then push lightly out on a serving plate. Each member of RF-star is busy chit-chatting and making mooncakes, which brings pleasure and warm atmosphere. After a while, several plates of crispy and delicious mooncakes come to the table. About Us Shenzhen RF-Star Technology Co., Ltd., founded in 2010, is a world leading Internet-of-Things (IoT) solution provider. RF-Star has the vision of a connected world with widely deployed IoT technology, such as BLE/BT, Wi-Fi, LoRa, ZigBee, Sub-1GHz, NB-IoT, RFID, which makes RF-star focus on creating innovative products and services, empowering industries to run intelligently and providing people a better life.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects billions of devices and brings a huge opportunity for businesses to grow. However, billions of new connected devices also brings billions of new opportunities for hackers to steal intellectual property (IP), compromise users’ property and invade their privacy. While consumer awareness for Internet security grows as more security breaches at large companies are revealed to the public, secure Internet communication technology has advanced to a level that provides online banking, e-commerce and government services. State-of-the-art Internet security relies on advanced cryptographic algorithms, powerful computers and collaboration between major Internet companies and users. The common security capabilities available to Internet applications today include the following: Private communication – Information exchanged between parties is encrypted, such that an eavesdropper cannot understand it. End-point authentication – Communicating parties confirm each other’s identity prior to any information exchange to prevent attackers from using a false identity to access information and gain unauthorized control of a remote device. Information authentication – Critical information including transaction data and software updates are digitally signed to authenticate its origin and prevent malware installation. These security capabilities largely rely on a few fundamental building blocks, including: Stable cryptographic ciphers such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA2) and the public key ciphers RSA and ECC. When used properly with an adequate key size, these ciphers have no known practical attack. The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, superseding its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, provides the framework for establishing a secure communication channel between two parties. It handles both information encryption and end-point authentication, and relies on the cryptographic ciphers mentioned above. Public key infrastructure (PKI) provides the building blocks for authentication and trust through a digital certificate standard and certificate authorities (CA) such as Symantec and others. The benefit of using these well-known ciphers and protocols in IoT applications is two-fold. First, it relies on proven technology that is widely deployed and tested by the industry at a mega-scale. Second, it allows harnessing the power of already deployed Internet services (e.g. email, social media) as well as the public key infrastructure provided by CAs. Although Internet security technology is widely available, recent research from Symantec Security suggests that many deployed IoT devices have not implemented adequate security measures. There are likely multiple reasons for these security gaps, but vendor awareness, software complexity and implementation costs are probably at the top of the list. Many IoT devices are based on low-end microcontrollers (MCUs) that have limited processing...

If you’re an Internet of Things (IoT) designer, you’re probably often challenged to do more with less when it comes to security, constantly looking for new ways to protect your products against an ever-growing list of threats with lean system resources and perhaps limited experience. Knowing that these struggles are very real, in this post I’ll outline a few top IoT security risks and common misconceptions on how to address them. I will also provide an overview of how new CC3220SF Wi-Fi module RF-WM-3200B1 give you more tools to help address security challenges through a novel architecture and rich set of integrated security features. Are there IoT applications that don’t need to implement security measures? Any device that connects to the internet may be vulnerable to local or remote attacks. Attackers can target almost any connected device to try and steal manufacturer intellectual property stored in the system, gain access to user data, or even maliciously manipulate the system to compromise users or attack third parties online. As demonstrated by the major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack late last year, labeled by experts as the largest of its kind in history, even seemingly harmless products such as home digital video recorders (DVRs) can be maliciously infected and used as “botnets” to halt operations for third-party entities. The attack last year affected services such as Twitter and PayPal, but similar attacks could potentially target large smart infrastructure technologies such as electric grid systems. According to a 2016 study conducted by Kapersky Lab, a single DDoS attack can cost an organization more than $1.6 million to resolve. Recognizing these threats,RF-star's CC3220SF Wi-Fi module integrates a host of powerful, multilayered and hardware-based security features to provide you with powerful tools to help protect products from attacks such as local or remote packet sniffing, man-in-the-middle (MITM) server emulation, hostile takeovers via over-the-air updates, remote file manipulation, data and software theft, intellectual property (IP) cloning, and many more. Watch the below video to learn more about these tools: Should IoT security features primarily focus on Wi-Fi and internet-level encryption of packets sent over the air? Having strong Wi-Fi (Advanced Encryption Standard [AES]/Wired Equivalent Privacy [WEP]) and internet-level (Transport Layer Security [TLS]/Secure Sockets Layer [SSL]) encryption is critical to help prevent local and remote network-packet sniffing, respectively. But these measures alone may not be enough to fend off hostile takeover attempts or provide full protection against theft of IP, code, data, keys and identity information stored and used in a connected system. Figure 1 illustrates these measures in action. Figure 1: Local network security features in action The CC3220 Wi-Fi module actually integrates more than 25 additional security features to help provide tools that address potential thr...