Semtech Blog

LR2021 Long Range Demos at The Things Conference 2026

Swaroop Chitturi — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 17:32:57 GMT

The Things Conference returned to De Kromhouthal in Amsterdam on Sept. 22-23, 2026, for its ninth edition, under the theme “Put Your Demo Where Your Mouth Is.” What started in 2018 as a community built around LoRaWAN^® has grown into a cross-technology gathering for the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge ecosystem, with LoRaWAN, cellular IoT, edge artificial intelligence (AI), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and more all sharing the same floor.

Semtech was part of the program from start to finish, with live LR2021 demos at our booth, multiple keynotes, two ecosystem panels, hands-on workshops, and a panel on diversity in IoT. Here is a look back at what we showed and shared, with links to the session recordings so you can catch up.

The Semtech team and booth at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam

LR2021 Demos at the Semtech Booth

1. Long Range Image Transfer with LR2021 and FLRP-Burst

A low-power camera node sent a full image over long range powered by the LR2021 and the newly released Fast Long-Range Protocol (FLRP)-Burst, which combines the range of LoRa^® with the speed of Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC). The same demo was the basis for our hands-on workshop, so visitors could see it live on the booth and then run it themselves.

2. Z-Wave Assisted Video Transfer over FLRC on LR2021

A Z-Wave-enabled door motion sensor triggered an LR2021-connected camera to record a five-second video. That clip, around 150 kilobytes of data, reached the monitor via FLRC in under a second. First shown at Embedded World, the demo, built on hardware from Trident IoT, shows how LR2021 brings multi-protocol flexibility to everyday security workflows.

3. Amazon Sidewalk Device Showcase

A static display of Amazon Sidewalk devices showed visitors the growing range of products bringing Sidewalk connectivity to market.

4. LoRa Alliance Network Discovery on LR2021

A first look at Network Discovery on LR2021, the new capability the LoRa Alliance^® is crafting to simplify advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and automatic meter reading (AMR) deployments, was previewed in the LoRa Alliance pod hosted at the Semtech booth.

Keynotes: How the LoRa Ecosystem and LR2021 Extend Range and Data Rate

Olivier Beaujard, senior director of the LoRa ecosystem at Semtech and chair of the LoRa Alliance Board, opened the Semtech keynote track with The Ecosystem Behind LoRa’s Success. His talk traced how a growing, collaborative and highly innovative open ecosystem turned LoRa technology from a radio technology into the world’s leading low power wide area network (LPWAN) standard, unlocking real-world impact across smart cities, agriculture, utilities, logistics, and industrial IoT.

Semtech integrated circuits (ICs) now support multi-protocol capability, with Z-Wave being one of them. Olivier is at the forefront of this innovation and also represents Semtech on the Z-Wave Alliance board of directors. He took part in The Truth About IoT Protocols, which looked at where Z-Wave Long Range, LoRaWAN and other wireless technologies really work.

Catch up on Olivier’s sessions:

Sebastien Lebreton, director of product management at Semtech, followed with Long Range – Low Power and High Data Rate: No Longer an Oxymoron. Industry adopters often assume that long range, low power and high data rate are mutually exclusive, and Semtech has shown otherwise with FLRC and FLRP-Burst. Semtech has long delivered low power wireless devices that, combined with the long range of LoRa technology, power today’s LoRaWAN ecosystem for low data rate, long range communications. Sebastien showed how the newest generation, LoRa Plus™ LR2021, extends that range advantage into the Mbps data rate, bringing range and consumption together at a level beyond the present state of the art for the first time. He detailed how Semtech research and development (R&D) made this possible, how the synergies between LoRa technology and FLRC are being harnessed to deliver a new smart wireless protocol and which use cases and application scenarios it now opens.

Catch up on Sebastien’s session:

Long Range – Low Power and High Data Rate: No Longer an Oxymoron

Amazon Sidewalk and LoRaWAN: Expanding Connectivity at Scale

Semtech ICs are among the preferred hardware options for Amazon Sidewalk, and this panel put hardware and protocol side by side. Søren Lorentzen, global business development & go-to-market leader for Amazon Sidewalk, joined Shahar Feldman, vice president of wireless IC product marketing at Semtech, for a discussion on the next chapter of IoT, moderated by Michelle Lozada, vice president of corporate marketing at Semtech.

The conversation covered how Amazon Sidewalk and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are expanding connectivity at scale, why LoRaWAN remains a cornerstone of the LPWAN ecosystem and how the complementary strengths of the two technologies create new opportunities for developers, enterprises and solution providers. The panel closed on the shared goal of enabling seamless device connectivity and laying the foundation for Physical AI.

Catch up on the session:

Sidewalk and LoRaWAN: Expanding Connectivity at Scale

Smart Water Metering Panel: Why LoRaWAN Wins the Connectivity Evaluation

Water utilities issuing smart water AMI tenders face a bewildering array of connectivity options, each promising interoperability, reliability and low total cost of ownership. This panel brought together network operators, meter original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and connectivity architects to unpack what separates winning proposals from the rest. Joining the discussion were Stéphane Comignan of Veolia, Frederik Oliver of Netmore and Vishal Mungra of Itron.

The panelists examined how Open Metering System (OMS) compliance, reversibility (utility-owned versus carrier-owned networks) and multi-vendor interoperability translate into concrete tender scoring criteria. They discussed why a mature multi-vendor ecosystem, spanning chipsets, modules, network infrastructure, and meter OEMs, drives down costs and de-risks long-term supply. They also shared real deployment data on network capacity planning and service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees, and contrasted the open ecosystem model of LoRaWAN with proprietary and cellular alternatives. Attendees left with a practical framework for evaluating connectivity bids beyond marketing claims.

How Does FLRP-Burst on LR2021 Deliver Long Range at High Data Rate?

Saad Skali, senior product manager of wireless ICs at Semtech, led a two-part hands-on workshop, FLRP-burst for Long Range at High Data Rate: Business Rationale & Technical Hands-On, showing how FLRP combines LoRa technology and FLRC to resolve the trade-off between speed, range and power. The focus was on use cases where battery-powered devices need to move large files over long distances.

Participants were walked through the Image Transfer demo code and the exact steps to run it live on standard LR2021 evaluation kits (EVKs): a low-power camera node sending a full image over long range. Attendees came away with FLRP running on real hardware and a clear view of where it fits in their next design.

Women in IoT Panel: Career On-Ramps and What Needs to Change

Semtech also presented a panel that asked a more specific question than “why does diversity matter”: how do women actually get into IoT? Whether through engineering, or through marketing, executive, partnerships, and ecosystem roles, the panel traced the real on-ramps, including the paths that led each speaker here, the moments that almost closed the door and what needs to change to open it wider for the next person. The panel was characterized by an intense and insightful Q&A session.

The panel featured Michelle Lozada, Fabienne Maire (director of business development at TEKTELIC), Carlo Tinella, Annalena Zottmann (business development and partners manager at Diehl), Dr. Maroua Taghouti (co-founder and CTO of bitteiler GmbH), Laura Bueno (IoT consultant at Schwarz Digits), and Miriam Surro (computer engineer, entrepreneur, and co-founder and CEO of MiDo).

Watch the panel:

Women in IoT – Who’s In the Room

What’s Next for LoRa Plus and FLRP After The Things Conference 2026

The Things Conference 2026 reinforced a message that ran across our sessions: The strength of LoRa technology comes from its ecosystem, and the next chapter is about extending that ecosystem into higher data rates with LoRa Plus and FLRP and into new connectivity partnerships such as Amazon Sidewalk. A big thank you to The Things Industries for hosting, to our partners and panelists for the open conversations and to everyone who stopped by to see the demos for themselves.

To learn more about LoRa Plus and FLRP, visit semtech.com/lora.

Semtech^®, the Semtech logo, LoRa^®, and LoRa Alliance^® are registered trademarks or service marks, and LoRa Plus™ and the LoRa Plus logo are trademarks or service marks, of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. LoRaWAN^® is a mark used under license from the LoRa Alliance. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Electronica India 2026: Smart Metering, IoT Modules, Protection, and Power Demos

Swaroop Chitturi — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:27:42 GMT

Electronica India 2026, held Sept. 16-18 in Bengaluru, showed how utilities and device makers can build smart meters that work across fixed networks, walk-by collections and multiple wireless protocols. At booth H3.G11, Semtech showcased how LoRa^® technology now extends from low-power sensing to network discovery and multi-protocol connectivity across LoRaWAN^®, wireless M-Bus (wM-Bus), Wireless Smart Utility Network (Wi-SUN), and mesh networking, supported by India's homegrown LoRa ecosystem.

Made-In-India LoRa "Wall of Devices" on Display at Electronica India

The LoRa “Wall of Devices” stood out at the Semtech booth as a showcase dedicated exclusively to made-in-India end products built on integrated circuits that use LoRa technology. The display gave visitors a hands-on view of how module makers, meter manufacturers, gateway vendors, and solution integrators in India, are building on LoRa and LoRaWAN to serve smart metering, smart city and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) deployments across the country.

Throughout the day the "Wall of Devices" drew steady traffic, with visitors pausing to examine the range of end nodes, gateways and meters on display and to ask the Semtech technical team about design-in support for their own products that leverage LoRa technology.

Robert Comanescu, vice president of applications engineering R&D, and Carlo Tinella, director of product marketing for LoRa at Semtech, pose in front of the LoRa ''Wall of Devices'' at the Semtech booth.

Network Discovery Combines Fixed and Walk-By Meter Reading Over LoRaWAN

Ahead of the show, Semtech offered a teaser of Network Discovery for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Automated Meter Reading (AMR) over LoRaWAN, a capability aimed squarely at utilities that need both fixed-network and walk-by/drive-by meter reading from the same device.

In the live demo, a water meter built around the Semtech LR2021 supports two parallel paths. When a fixed LoRaWAN gateway is in range, the meter joins the fixed network and exchanges uplinks and downlink acknowledgments with it, the classic AMI path. When no fixed gateway is available, the same meter falls back to beaconing its readings so that a mobile LoRaWAN gateway, carried on foot or by vehicle, can pick them up during a walk-by or drive-by collection, the AMR path. Both gateways forward data over USB to a Raspberry Pi-based controller computer, which publishes the readings over Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) to a Grafana dashboard for visualization.

Network Discovery: AMI/AMR over LoRaWAN demo architecture, showing fixed and mobile gateway paths from a single LR2021 transceiver based in a water meter to a Grafana dashboard.

Applications include:

Utilities transitioning from pure AMR to hybrid AMI/AMR deployments.
Rural or hard-to-cover areas where fixed gateway density is still being built out.
Dynamic network discovery for meters that must operate reliably in both connectivity modes.
Phased smart metering rollouts that need drive-by reading today and fixed-network AMI tomorrow.

Advanced Multi-Connectivity for Smart Water Meters: wM-Bus with LR1121

Building on its dual-connectivity work with EMBIT and Webdyn, Semtech featured featured an Advanced Multi-Connectivity demo for smart water meters combining wM-Bus and LoRaWAN on a single meter design. Two simulated water meters, each built around an EMBIT Modem-E module using Semtech's LoRa Basics™ LR1121. The demo showed two complementary scenarios: one meter acting purely as a wM-Bus endpoint for AMI and AMR collection, and a second meter demonstrating EMBIT's Hot Switch capability to move between LoRaWAN and wM-Bus connectivity without a network rejoin.

On the collection side, a Webdyn Easy wM-Bus collector based on the Semtech LR2021 operating at 868MHz gathered meter readings over wireless M-Bus and forwarded them by Wi-Fi to a Semtech Raspberry Pi server. From there, data was published over MQTT and Universal Serial Bus (USB) to a central system dashboard, where visitors could watch live flow readings and daily volume totals update in real time.

Advanced Multi-Connectivity Demo for Smart Water Meter: EMBIT LR1121 end point(s), Webdyn Easy wM-Bus collector with LR2021, and a live dashboard.

Applications include:

Water, gas and heat metering networks standardized on wM-Bus (EN 13757).
Utilities that need a seamless fallback between LoRaWAN and wM-Bus connectivity.
AMI/AMR deployments consolidating on a single multi-protocol chipset.

NeoCortec Brings DLMS Mesh Networking to LoRa Smart Metering

NeoCortec, a longtime partner, returned to the booth with a smart metering demo combining its NeoMesh wireless mesh protocol with the Semtech LR2021 transceiver. The demo showed how NeoMesh's native Device Language Message Specification (DLMS) / High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) adaptation layer rides on top of the LR Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC), LoRa and Frequency-Shift Keying (FSK) modulations to deliver a scalable, self-healing wireless platform suited to dense smart metering networks, using FLRC for tightly packed meter clusters and LoRa when longer hops between nodes are needed.

NeoCortec has pointed to India's smart energy metering market as a significant growth opportunity, and which drew a lot of attention from ecosystem partners at Electronica - India 2026.

Applications include:

Large-scale electricity smart metering networks.
Dense urban meter deployments requiring self-healing mesh connectivity.
DLMS/HDLC-based utility data collection at scale.

Image Transfer at Up to 2.6Mbps with LoRa Plus^™ LR2021

The Semtech Fast Long-Range Protocol (FLRP)-Burst image transfer demo returned to the booth, this time built on the LoRa Plus LR2021 transceiver. The demonstration streamed images between two LR2021-based devices using FLRP modulation at data rates of up to 2.6Mbps (subject to local Industrial, Scientific and Medical band regulations), far exceeding the data rates attendees typically associate with LoRa connectivity.

By pairing this throughput with the long range and low power consumption characteristic of LoRa technology, the LR2021 opens the door to image- and video-class payloads for applications that previously depended on other radio technologies to meet their data transfer requirements.

Applications include:

Security surveillance and remote camera systems.
Drone communications and telemetry.
Remote and industrial inspection systems.
Border security and perimeter monitoring.

Wi-SUN and LoRaWAN Run on One LR2021 Transceiver

Semtech also demonstrated Wi-SUN connectivity running on the LoRa Plus LR2021, in a demo developed with Exegin, whose Wi-SUN stack is used in utility-grade mesh deployments. The demo highlighted how a single LR2021 transceiver can support Wi-SUN FSK alongside LoRa and LoRaWAN, letting solution providers choose the connectivity protocol that best fits a given market without changing hardware.

This kind of hybrid architecture is particularly relevant for e-metering markets where Wi-SUN is the incumbent or preferred mesh protocol, but where LoRaWAN can extend coverage into areas where Wi-SUN mesh density is too low to guarantee reliable connectivity.

Applications include:

Electricity and gas smart metering networks built on Wi-SUN.
Hybrid LoRaWAN/Wi-SUN backhaul for utility mesh networks.
Smart city infrastructure needing multi-protocol flexibility from a single chip.

5G Cellular IoT Modules for Every Deployment

Alongside its LoRa technology demonstrations, the Semtech booth also highlighted its 5G cellular IoT module portfolio, giving visitors a fuller picture of how LoRa and cellular connectivity fit together across a utility or enterprise deployment mix.

Four modules anchored the conversation:

EM9291: a 5G mobile broadband module ideal for mobile computing and high-performance networking applications.
EM8695: a 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) module ideal for global deployment.
WP7608: a programmable LTE module with an application processor running the Legato^® application framework, a rich set of edge and cloud APIs, an optional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and a cellular modem with an ultra-low power domain.
RC7620: a low-cost LTE module ideal for IoT applications such as industrial manufacturing, smart cities, telematics, and mission-critical networking.

Together, these modules give solution providers a path to pair long range and low power connectivity of LoRa technology with cellular backhaul and mobile broadband, whether that means a RedCap uplink for a fixed AMI gateway, a programmable LTE module driving an edge application or a mobile broadband module for a high-performance networking use case.

Semtech team with 5G module distributor partners at the Electronica India 2026 booth.

Beyond LoRa: PerSe^® Smart Sensing Demos in Action

The Semtech smart-sensing zone showcased PerSe capacitive touch and proximity sensor SX9200 and automotive-grade SX9331WQ across four live demos:

Smart Home Automation Panel: proximity-gated LEDs, toggle/tap-and-hold controls and slider dimming, extended to media control on wearables like smart glasses and headphones.
Smart Human Sensing/Spoof Detection: distinguishing real touch from fake samples for secure fingerprint authentication.
Liquid Level and Type Identification: differentiating E0/E20 fuel and fresh/used transformer oil.
Automotive Seat Occupancy: detecting human occupants vs. objects.

Together, these highlighted the platform's core strengths (proximity sensing, smart slider/wheel, touch, tap-and-hold, tap counter, and toggle button) across consumer, wearable, industrial, and automotive markets.

Force Sensing: What You Can Build With Force Touch Technology

The Semtech booth featured demonstrations under the “Force Sense” theme, showing how force sensing expands design and user experience (UX) options for modern devices. Built around force sensors that use Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, visitors had a hands-on demo of what becomes possible when force is added to a design.

Device Showcase: Built With Semtech Force Touch, Displayed at the Booth

Internal sensor demo model: demonstrated sensor functionality on a metal enclosure, supporting single- and multi-press applications along with force-level detection.
Boardroom presentation pointer: a presentation device built with a Semtech force sensor, offering two-step threshold functionality and a built-in laser pointer.
Health monitor: used precise force sensing to help apply the correct pressure for optimal blood-oxygen readings.
Premium true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds: a metal-cased earbud with force-sensing technology for pressure-sensitive media control.
Automatic dispenser: a plastic, sealed enclosure integrating force sensing for a modern design and continuous spray.
Smartwatch: force sensing enables seamless haptic buttons on an aluminum case, with no protruding buttons to snag or fail.

What Electronica India 2026 Signals for LoRa in India

Attendee Response and Industry Engagement

Attendee interest across smart metering, smart cities and industrial IoT verticals reflected a market that is moving from evaluation to deployment. Conversations at the booth increasingly centered on multi-protocol strategy — how a single LoRa Plus chipset can serve LoRaWAN, wM-Bus, Wi-SUN, and mesh networking needs across existing and future utility rollout plans — alongside continued enthusiasm for the depth of India's own LoRa device ecosystem.

Strategic Market Position

The engagement at Electronica India 2026 reinforces India's position as one of the most active and fast-growing markets for LoRa and LoRaWAN technology. As utilities and solution providers weigh AMI, AMR and hybrid connectivity strategies, the expanding Semtech LoRa Plus portfolio and its network of local and global partners position the company to support the next phase of India's smart infrastructure buildout.

Explore the full range of LoRa products from Semtech, case studies and other resources, or subscribe to the LoRa Monthly Newsletter for the latest advancements in LoRa technology.

Semtech®, the Semtech logo, LoRa®, LoRaWAN®, PerSe®, and Legato® are registered trademarks or service marks, and LoRa Basics™, LoRa Plus™ are trademarks or service mark, of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

IOTE Shenzhen 2026: Semtech and the LoRa Ecosystem Chart the Next Chapter of IoT Innovation

Swaroop Chitturi — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:44:14 GMT

The 2026 LoRa^® Global Ecosystem Forum, held during the International Internet of Things Exhibition (IOTE) 2026 in Shenzhen, once again brought together customers, ecosystem partners, developers, and media from across the industry to explore the future of LoRa technology and the continued growth of its global ecosystem. Despite challenging weather conditions in Shenzhen on the day of the event, the forum drew a strong turnout that reinforced the leadership Semtech has built across the LoRa ecosystem. Adding to the momentum, the Semtech LoRa Plus™ LR2021 received the 2026 25th IOTE Gold Award – Innovative Product Award, further validating the innovation behind this next-generation LoRa platform.

This year's forum captured a clear shift in the ecosystem's focus. Where past conversations centered on understanding the capabilities of LR2021, this year's discussions moved decisively toward real-world deployment business models, commercialization pathways and production-ready solutions built on next-generation LoRa technology.

The 2026 LoRa Global Ecosystem Forum opened with a keynote from Mike Wong, vice president of sales at Semtech, who set the tone with “LoRa Connects the Future Industries and Global Markets.” Henry Huang, vice chair of the LoRa Alliance^® Board and CEO of Browan Communications, followed with a look at how LoRaWAN^® continues to underpin a thriving global Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Shahar Feldman, vice president of marketing at Semtech, then took the stage with “LoRa Multi-mode for Physical AI,” detailing how multi-mode LoRa Plus^™ radios are enabling physical AI at the edge.

A series of partner sessions followed. Zhao Feng of Rejeee shared large-scale application and deployment experience with LoRa industrial wireless sensing terminals, while Joey Jiang of Seeed Studio discussed bridging the last mile of Edge AI deployment. Hank Zheng of Milesight presented advances in AI-accelerated digital sensing, and Olivier Bernard, Business Development Head at Amazon Sidewalk, outlined how the platform is scaling to reach more than 200 million homes with LoRa serving as one of its integral connectivity layers. Jiabin Tuo of Quectel showcased a combined LoRa and Sidewalk connectivity offering, and Andy Gan of HopeRF covered the convergence of IoT, sensing and AI technologies.

Later in the day, Blaise Paratte, director of technical product management at Semtech, demonstrated how LR2021 and Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) are redefining wireless video transmission, while Swaroop Chitturi, product marketing manager at Semtech, joined virtually to deliver “Beyond Reactive Maintenance: LoRa Enabling Predictive Maintenance for Solar Renewable Energy,” exploring how LoRa is powering predictive maintenance for solar energy assets.

Additional ecosystem sessions rounded out the program: Jerry Xie of Appcon presented drone-based mobile gateways extending wide-area IoT coverage; Xu Hai of Hylintech shared LR2021-based video transmission use cases in “From ‘Perception’ to ‘Vision’”; Zhang Hui of Lierda introduced an open-source, multi-mode platform built on LR2021; Ivan Xie of Sowye discussed pairing Wi-Fi and LoRa to reshape smart home development; Archy An of Minew presented multi-protocol terminal architectures centered on LoRa technology; Sky Xu of Ai-Thinker shared a full-stack, end-to-cloud LoRa solution approach; and Qiang Lv of Guodian Gaoke outlined how LoRa and the Tianqi satellite constellation are shaping a global space-air-ground-sea AIoT ecosystem.

The day closed with a panel discussion, “From LoRaWAN to LoRa Plus: Building the Global Connectivity Platform for Future Industries,” featuring Mike Wong alongside panelists from HopeRF, the LoRa Alliance, Amazon, Lierda, Seeed Studio, Milesight, and Appcon. Friend Yu, China Country Manager at Semtech, then closed the forum with a call for continued ecosystem collaboration.

Inside the Semtech Booth: LoRa Ecosystem Innovation on Display

Across the show floor, the Semtech booth once again became a focal point for next-generation LoRa technology, bringing together live demonstrations from Semtech and ecosystem partners alike.

Ecosystem partners showcased innovations spanning video and image transmission, Edge AI connectivity, low-altitude networks, satellite IoT, asset tracking, and intelligent sensing, reflecting both the growing maturity of the ecosystem and the expanding market opportunities that LoRa technology continues to unlock. Highlights included:

LoRa Plus Module Ecosystem

Module partners continue to expand the LoRa Plus ecosystem, making it easier for developers to bring next-generation LoRa designs to market.

Featured Demos at the Semtech Booth

Long-Range Video Streaming: Teaser demonstrations of the P4 video streaming and Fast Long-Range Communication Intellectual Property (FLRC-IP) video transmission gave attendees an early look at the next generation of long-range video capabilities, while ecosystem partner Hylin showcased its own LR2021-based video transmission solution delivering low-latency performance — underscoring the growing potential of LoRa in industrial inspection, agriculture, security, emergency response, and drone applications.
High-Speed Image Transfer with the Fast Long-Range Protocol (FLRP): There were two interactive FLRP image transfer demos. One was built around a moving duck game and another with button-and-display controls, showing how the FLRP delivers fast, reliable image transfer over long range. Ecosystem partner Lierda complemented these with a fast color image transfer demonstration on a VGA screen using its AM36 Multimedia Development Kit.
LR2021 Z-Wave Assisted Video Transfer over FLRC: A Z-Wave-enabled door motion sensor triggered an LR2021-connected camera to capture a five-second video clip, which then transmitted 150KB of data to a monitor via FLRC in under a second. The demo, built on hardware from Trident IoT, showed how LR2021 can fuse motion sensing, video capture and ultra-fast wireless transfer into a single, lightweight security workflow.

The Z-Wave Demo and FLRC Demo with LR2021

Compact One-Channel Hub: The lightweight One-Channel Hub demo continued to draw attention from visitors exploring simplified, cost-effective LoRaWAN gateway deployments for smaller networks.
Long-Range Audio & Voice: Ecosystem partner Sicomm brought a live walkie-talkie demonstration to the booth, while NiceRF showcased a 16-channel, full-duplex audio and data wireless demo both illustrating how LoRa technology can deliver reliable, long-range voice communication for emergency response, campus and industrial use cases.
Edge AI & Amazon Sidewalk: Ecosystem partner Seeed Studio demonstrated an Edge AI solution pairing a camera with a LoRa chip and on-device AI processing, showing how LoRa connectivity can support efficient data collection, event verification and remote upgrades in environments where traditional connectivity is limited. A dedicated Amazon Sidewalk device showcase further highlighted the opportunities in large-scale device connectivity and broad coverage.

Mr. Shahar Feldman captures himself on camera during the Seeed Studio edge AI demo with on-device processing

LR2021 Ranging, Handheld Devices & Smart Home: Attendees experienced the LR2021 EVK ranging demonstration in action, alongside a Makefire LR2021 handheld terminal and a smart home system from Sowye built on Tuya's platform, rounding out a booth filled with real-world applications built on next-generation LoRa technology.

Partner Demo Showcases

One of the most distinctive features of this year's forum was the breadth of practical applications showcased by ecosystem partners, evidence that the LoRa ecosystem is evolving from individual technology capabilities toward complete, commercially deployable solutions spanning terrestrial, low-altitude and satellite connectivity.

Amazon Sidewalk Ecosystem

Amazon shared the latest developments in Amazon Sidewalk, highlighting opportunities in large-scale device connectivity, simplified deployment, broad coverage, and device-to-cloud communications. The presentation generated significant interest among customers exploring international IoT opportunities.

Video and Image Transmission

Hylin demonstrated an LR2021-based video transmission solution capable of delivering low-latency performance. The live demo drew significant customer interest and highlighted growing potential of LoRa across industrial inspection, agriculture, security, emergency response, and drone applications.

LoRa Connectivity for Edge AI Applications

Seeed Studio showed how LoRa connectivity can support Edge AI deployments by enabling efficient data collection, event verification, image transmission, and remote upgrades in environments where traditional connectivity options are limited.

Low-Altitude Network Applications

Appcon introduced a drone-based mobile gateway solution designed to expand coverage, address communication blind spots and support mobile and emergency data collection, a concept that received strong interest within emerging low-altitude and wide-area IoT applications.

Accelerating LoRa Ecosystem Commercialization

Lierda showcased an LR2021-based open platform ecosystem covering modules, development tools, open hardware, and multiple application solutions, demonstrating the increasing ability of ecosystem partners to accelerate product development and commercialization.

Satellite IoT

Guodian Gaoke presented its Tianqi satellite IoT constellation and related applications, illustrating how satellite connectivity can complement terrestrial networks and provide coverage for maritime, transportation, energy, emergency-response, and remote-area use cases.

Ecosystem and Partner Value: The Roundtable Discussion

The forum further demonstrated the role Semtech plays as an ecosystem enabler, providing an effective platform for customers, distributors, module vendors, design partners, system integrators, and solution providers to exchange requirements, explore partnerships and accelerate solution development.

The roundtable discussion became one of the highlights of the forum. Panelists expressed strong confidence in the long-term commercial potential of the LoRa ecosystem, emphasizing that continued investment in LoRa-based solutions is creating new business opportunities across multiple industries. The session generated enthusiastic audience participation, reinforcing the shared belief that LoRa technology continues to offer a compelling platform for innovation, commercialization and long-term growth.

Media Engagement

A dedicated media group interview followed the Amazon presentation, featuring Mike Wong, Shahar Feldman and Henry Huang, Vice Chair of the Board of the LoRa Alliance. A total of 12 industry editors participated, with media interest focused on:

LoRa ecosystem development
Fourth-generation LoRa technologies
LoRa Plus roadmap
Amazon Sidewalk
Satellite IoT
Global market opportunities

Given the high level of participation and limited interview time, several questions could not be fully addressed during the session.

Beyond the Semtech Booth: LoRa Across the Show Floor

Beyond the traction at the Semtech booth, other LoRa device and module makers exhibited at IOTE 2026 with innovative products spanning multiple industries including personnel trackers, smart plugs, smoke detection sensors, smart building solutions, and industrial sensors, among many others.

MINEW Semi LoRa Module Portfolio displayed at their booth

Personnel Tags enabled by LoRa on display for Industrial Safety Applications

Smart Plug enabled by LoRa and Smart Switch enabled with Tuya ecosystem from SOWYE

Different kinds of Sensors enabled by LoRa for Industries such as Connected Spaces, Industrial Automation, Smart Buildings, etc.

Looking Forward: The Future of the LoRa Ecosystem

The 2026 LoRa Global Ecosystem Forum demonstrated the continued growth and increasing maturity of the LoRa ecosystem. The recognition of LR2021 with the Innovative Product Gold Award at the 25th IOTE 2026, together with the innovative applications showcased by ecosystem partners, provided strong validation of both the product innovation of Semtech and the ecosystem's ability to convert that innovation into market-relevant solutions.

Applications spanning video and image transmission, low-altitude networks, Edge AI connectivity, Amazon Sidewalk, open development platforms, and satellite IoT demonstrated how LoRa technology is expanding into new markets and unlocking new opportunities. Beyond the technology demonstrations and customer engagement, the forum reflected growing ecosystem confidence, stronger partner commitment and increasing market readiness for next-generation LoRa applications.

Strong participation, high-quality customer engagement, broad ecosystem involvement, and positive media interest reinforced the company’s position as both a technology leader and ecosystem enabler. The next priority is to convert this momentum into measurable business outcomes through expanded ecosystem collaboration, new design wins, increased customer adoption, new business opportunities, and sustainable revenue growth.

We would like to thank all speakers, ecosystem partners, customers, media representatives, distributors, and internal teams for their support in making this event a success.

Semtech®, LoRa®, LoRa Alliance®, LoRa Plus™ and the Semtech logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. LoRaWAN® is a mark used under license from the LoRa Alliance. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Fast Long-Range Protocol Burst: Megabit Speeds Meet Kilometer-Range Wireless Links

Swaroop Chitturi — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:31:35 GMT

Wireless links have traditionally forced a trade-off between speed and range. High-throughput technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can move large amounts of data quickly, but their practical range is often limited. Long-range technologies can cover much greater distances, but typically at lower data rates. Fast Long-Range Protocol (FLRP) burst is designed for the gap between these two worlds: a kilometer-class range with megabit-per-second data transfer.

Why FLRP Burst: Closing the Speed-vs-Range Gap

What is FLRP Burst?

FLRP burst is a high-throughput wireless transfer protocol built on the Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) physical layer (PHY). It combines a low-power LoRa^® Wake-on-Radio (WOR) mechanism with a high-speed FLRC data burst. The result is a link designed to sustain high data rates over long distances while keeping the radio active for as little time as possible.

Protocol	FLRP Burst Connection setup · Adaptive link selection · Burst segmentation · Acknowledgement (ACK) + retry
Physical Layer (PHY)	LoRa	FLRC

Why combine LoRa and FLRC?

LoRa and FLRC each handle what they do best:

Synchronization: The LoRa WOR phase aligns the link in frequency and time before the burst, which improves frequency tolerance and eliminates waking on noise.
Control: LoRa carries the signaling that sets up and adapts each exchange, using its range and robustness to always optimize the link to the highest possible data rate — reducing time on-air for longer battery life.

What FLRP Burst Delivers: Speed, Range and Efficiency

The FLRP burst's value isn't in range or throughput on its own — it's in the combination of letting devices move images, logs, diagnostics, or firmware without keeping a high-power radio active for long.

High Throughput: FLRP burst supports adaptive per-exchange PHY rates from 0.26 to 2.6Mbps, with up to 1.7Mbps payload throughput within the data burst (before WOR, channel-selection and ACK overhead).
Long Range at Speed: FLRP burst can achieve more than 1Mbps payload throughput at kilometer-class range for both Sub-GHz and 2.4GHz frequency plans.
Shorter Time on Air: A higher data rate means the same payload can be transferred in less time. For a battery-powered device, that can reduce the time the high-power transmit or receive path remains active.
Lower Energy per Transfer: The LR2021 transmitter, part of the LoRa Plus^™ portfolio, significantly exceeds typical efficiency levels for comparable radios. FLRP burst compounds that advantage by pairing the efficient transmit path with a low-power WOR wake-up and a short, high-speed burst — driving down the energy needed to deliver each payload. This matters most when devices move relatively large payloads occasionally.
Adaptive Links: FLRP burst can probe up to 16 enabled channels and adapt the data rate for each exchange. Per-burst acknowledgment and selective retransmission avoid retransmitting packets that were already received.
Low-Power Idle Operation: Between exchanges, the receiver can use LoRa Channel Activity Detection (CAD) rather than continuous receive mode. With one CAD per second, idle current drops to roughly 100µA.

How Does FLRP Burst Work: Wake, Adapt, Transfer, Sleep

FLRP burst separates the low-power discovery and synchronization phase from the high-speed data phase. The receiving device remains in a low-power listening state until the initiator starts an exchange. Once the link is established, FLRP burst selects suitable radio conditions and moves the payload using short FLRC bursts.

Phase 1: LoRa WOR Connection Setup

The initiator sends a long-preamble LoRa WOR signal sized to cover the receiver's sleep period. The receiver detects the preamble during a routine CAD check, verifies the target Device Extended Unique Identifier (DevEUI) and replies. This exchange establishes the timing and frequency alignment needed for the FLRC burst.

Phase 2: Adaptive Channel and Data Rate Selection

The transmitting side can probe up to 16 enabled channels. The receiver measures Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and frequency offset and selects an appropriate channel and data rate for the burst. This adaptive step can also be disabled or limited to channel selection or data-rate selection.

Phase 3: High-Speed Data Burst

Payload data is transferred as back-to-back FLRC packets, with each burst capped at 400ms. If a payload is larger than the selected data rate can fit into that window, FLRP burst splits it into consecutive bursts. Each burst has its own acknowledgment (ACK) and retry cycle. Only packets confirmed missing by the receiver are retransmitted.

Phase 4: Optional Data Integrity

When cryptographic integrity is enabled, every packet carries an Advanced Encryption Standard Cipher-based Message Authentication Code (AES-CMAC) message integrity code in place of the radio's standard Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC). The receiver validates the code before accepting the payload. This provides packet-level integrity and authentication against modification or spoofing; it should not be confused with payload encryption.

Real-World Applications for Fast, Long-Range, Low-Power Wireless

Security Cameras: Alarm Verification

Consider a battery-powered camera with a passive infrared (PIR) sensor. Most of the time, the node can remain in a low-power listening state. When the sensor detects an event, the camera captures a snapshot or short clip and sends it to a gateway.

This is where the combination of range, throughput, latency, and energy efficiency matters. The link must reach the gateway over a potentially long distance. It must also move a relatively large payload quickly. With FLRP burst, the high-speed FLRC burst can reduce transfer time and latency, while WOR and CAD keep the radio in a low-power state between events. Because each alarm is sent in a brief, high-rate burst with very little time on air, the node draws almost no energy per event — enabling multi-year battery life even at long range.

Firmware & Configuration Distribution

The FLRP burst bidirectional model supports firmware and configuration downloads to field-deployed sensors. Per-burst acknowledgment and selective retransmission help complete large transfers over imperfect links. Optional packet-level integrity checking can reject corrupted or modified packets before they reach the application layer.

Battery-Powered Sensor Networks

For sensor-to-gateway uploads, WOR and CAD reduce idle listening overhead. When data is available, the device can move larger payloads in a short burst rather than keeping the radio active for a long, low-rate transfer. This is useful for batched measurements, diagnostic logs and other data that does not fit comfortably into a low-data-rate link.

Conclusion: A Faster, Farther, More Efficient Wireless Protocol

The FLRP burst is designed to close a gap between high-throughput short-range wireless and low-rate long-range connectivity. It combines LoRa WOR and Channel Activity Detection with high-speed FLRC bursts to target megabit-class data transfer at kilometer-class range.

The benefit goes beyond peak throughput. Higher data rates can shorten time on air, reduce transfer latency and reduce the time the active radio path must remain powered. Combined with low-power listening between transfers, this architecture can improve the energy efficiency of large-payload transfers and extend battery life.

For applications such as battery-powered security cameras, the result is a link designed to deliver images and short clips quickly, over long distances, without requiring continuous high-power listening. The LR2021 provides the foundation for this approach today.

The code, demos and documentation above provide a starting point for evaluation. Talk to our team about how FLRP burst on the LR2021 fits your application. While this overview focuses on the LR2021, FLRP burst also runs on other Semtech radios, including the SX1280/SX1281.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is FLRP burst?

FLRP burst is a high-throughput wireless transfer protocol built on the Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) physical layer. It combines a low-power LoRa WOR mechanism with a high-speed FLRC data burst, designed to sustain high data rates over long distances while keeping the radio active for as little time as possible.

Why does FLRP burst combine LoRa and FLRC instead of using just one?

LoRa and FLRC each handle a different part of the job. LoRa's WOR phase aligns the link in frequency and time before the burst and carries the signaling that sets up and adapts each exchange, using its range and robustness to optimize the link to the highest possible data rate. FLRC then delivers the actual payload at high speed once the link is established.

What data rates and range can FLRP burst achieve?

FLRP burst supports adaptive per-exchange PHY rates from 0.26 to 2.6Mbps, with up to 1.7Mbps payload throughput within the data burst. It can achieve more than 1 Mbps payload throughput at kilometer-class range for both Sub-GHz and 2.4GHz frequency plans.

How does FLRP burst save power between transfers?

Between exchanges, the receiver can use LoRa Channel Activity Detection (CAD) instead of continuous receive mode — with one CAD check per second, idle current drops to roughly 100µA. Because the high-speed burst itself is short, devices spend very little time with the high-power transmit or receive path active, which helps extend battery life.

What happens if a data transfer is corrupted or interrupted?

Each burst has its own acknowledgment and retry cycle, and only packets confirmed missing by the receiver are retransmitted — so an interrupted transfer doesn't require resending the whole payload. When cryptographic integrity is enabled, every packet carries an AES-CMAC message integrity code that the receiver validates before accepting the payload, protecting against modification or spoofing (this is separate from payload encryption).

Semtech^®, the Semtech logo, LoRa^®, and LoRa Plus^™ are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Closing the Solar Farm Monitoring Gap with LoRa® Technology

Swaroop Chitturi — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:37:28 GMT

Solar panels get all the attention. But in a modern utility-scale solar installation, it is the trackers, inverters and cleaning robots that determine whether a farm meets its energy production targets. Trackers keep panels correctly oriented toward the sun, inverters convert what those panels produce into grid-usable AC power, and cleaning robots keep panel surfaces free of the dust and debris that silently erode energy yield between maintenance cycles. Between them, these three asset classes account for the majority of performance variability as well as costly failures.

For most of the industry's history, these asset classes have been monitored in the crudest possible way: with wired connections such as RS485 or similar that require trenching, conduit and a maintenance crew willing to chase cable faults across hundreds of hectares. As solar farms scale up, utility projects now routinely exceed 500MW and span thousands of acres. The economics of wired monitoring no longer hold.

This blog is about the specific role that LoRa® technology, built by Semtech, plays in closing that intelligence gap — not as a generic Internet of Things (IoT) solution, but as a purpose-fit connectivity layer for the precise challenges that trackers, inverters and cleaning robots create.

What Makes Inverter Monitoring So Difficult at Utility Scale?

There are three types of inverters in the solar renewable energy segment: string inverters, central inverters and microinverters. They all serve the same core function: DC-to-AC conversion, but each creates a distinct monitoring challenge.

Inverter efficiency degrades with heat. A string inverter running at 45°C converts measurably less power than the same unit at 25°C. Digital signal processor (DSP) faults, insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) wear and harmonic distortion are early-warning signs that can be caught by monitoring current and temperature profiles, but only if the data is actually reaching an analytics platform in real time. While wired architecture such as RS485 remains a viable approach when monitoring a small, fixed number of inverters, it does not scale economically or operationally to full-fleet coverage. At utility scale, running conduit to every inverter across hundreds of hectares requires significant upfront capital expenditure, and any expansion of the monitoring scope means additional trenching, cabling and commissioning work. Wireless connectivity, by contrast, allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and asset owners to extend monitoring to every inverter on site with minimal additional infrastructure, turning exhaustive coverage from a capital project into a configuration change.

Semtech engineered LoRa integrated circuits (ICs) for the constraints that inverter OEMs face at product level: compact footprint, cost-optimized bill of materials (BOM) and radio frequency (RF) performance that holds up across thousands of field deployments. For a manufacturer embedding wireless connectivity into a device that ships millions of units, all three of those factors carry equal weight in the design decision.

Some companies have taken a retrofit approach to inverter monitoring, building plug-and-play devices that attach directly to existing photovoltaic storage equipment without any rewiring. One example is a data acquisition stick built on the LoRa Connect™ SX1262, which slots into inverter infrastructure and immediately begins streaming real-time generation, voltage and current data to a cloud analytics platform. The device operates on a private LoRa network covering up to 100 nodes per gateway and bridges to cloud platforms via Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Modbus and Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol (TCP/UDP).

Why Is Solar Tracker Monitoring So Complex?

If inverters represent the electrical intelligence layer, trackers represent the mechanical intelligence layer of a solar farm. A solar tracker is a motorized mounting system that rotates panels to follow the sun across the sky. Single-axis trackers, the dominant design in utility installations, can boost energy yield by 10–25% compared to fixed-tilt systems. For example, at a 250MW farm, that difference can represent millions of dollars of annual revenue. But trackers are mechanical systems operating outdoors, continuously, and sometimes across extreme weather conditions. The failure modes are varied: actuator wear, motor faults, gearbox backlash, misalignment caused by uneven terrain settlement, and stow failures during high-wind events. A single tracker row that fails to auto-stow in time during a storm can suffer panel damage costing far more than the tracker itself.

The communication challenge is acute. A 250MW project may have 5,000–10,000 individual tracker rows, each needing to report its angle, motor status and fault codes. Those rows are distributed across terrain that is rarely flat and frequently remote. Cellular coverage in many solar-rich regions like rural India, the Middle East, Central Asia, or even in remote areas of North America and Europe can be unreliable or prohibitively expensive to guarantee at that node count.

PV Hardware (PVH), a Spanish tracker OEM with over 650 projects worldwide, took a different architectural path — LoRaWAN® — to achieve a similar goal. PVH's system uses integrated anemometers that trigger simultaneous stow commands across all tracker rows via LoRaWAN when wind speeds cross a threshold. The critical requirement is reliability: every tracker must receive and execute the stow command before wind damage occurs. The link budget and obstacle penetration characteristics of LoRa have been the criteria for the wireless technology choice, while the ease of building and managing a private network has oriented the choice toward a public well proven standard protocol like LoRaWAN. PVH has deployed up to several hundreds of thousands of trackers operating on LoRaWAN worldwide, with cases where a single network is managing up to 40,000 devices.

The Cleaning Robot Monitoring Gap

Cleaning robots are the newest of the three asset classes, and the one most often bolted onto a monitoring strategy as an afterthought. These autonomous or semi-autonomous units traverse rows of panels on rails or wheeled platforms, using brushes, air jets or water systems to remove the same dust and debris that erode energy yield between manual maintenance visits. On a large farm, a fleet of these robots can be the difference between panels that stay near peak output and panels that quietly lose several percentage points of production between cleaning cycles.

The monitoring problem here is different in character from inverters and trackers. A cleaning robot is mobile, so it cannot simply be wired into a fixed monitoring backbone the way an inverter or tracker controller can. It also runs on a battery between docking-station charges, so anything added to the platform must justify its power draw. And because a robot's job is to physically move across acres of panel rows, its connection to the network has to hold up continuously as it changes position, not just at a fixed point.

Operators need visibility into a specific set of signals: battery state of charge, current row and position, cleaning-cycle completion, and fault conditions such as a stalled brush motor or an obstruction on the rail. Missing any of these means a robot can sit idle mid-row for days before anyone notices, or return to its dock only partially charged for its next scheduled run.

This is where the same properties that make LoRa a fit for trackers and inverters apply just as directly to a moving platform. A robot only needs to stay in range of a single gateway covering the full site, not a dense mesh of short-range access points that would need to track its position. Low transmit current keeps the radio from competing with drive motors and cleaning mechanisms for battery budget. And because the same sub-GHz signal that penetrates metal racking and dense rows of panels also reaches a robot wherever it happens to be on the field, operators get continuous status updates without having to engineer connectivity around the robot's movement.

Why Does LoRa Fit Solar Monitoring Better Than Other Wireless Options?

The tracker, inverter and cleaning robot use cases share a specific set of requirements that explain why LoRa has emerged as the preferred connectivity solution across multiple OEMs independently:

Long range with low infrastructure overhead: A single LoRaWAN gateway can cover 2–15 km in open terrain, enough to serve an entire utility-scale farm from a single point. This is not achievable with Zigbee (10–100m per hop) or Wi-Fi (150m). For tracker control and cleaning robot dispatch, this means one gateway can maintain communication with every row simultaneously.
Sub-GHz propagation in complex environments: Metal mounting structures, inverter cabinets and the panels themselves create a RF challenging environment. Sub-GHz LoRa benefits from a higher link budget and lower propagation losses compared to higher-frequency alternatives, providing substantial margin against path loss across cluttered, metallic outdoor sites.
Power flexibility across node types: Tracker controllers and inverter monitoring nodes are typically powered from the equipment they monitor. Cleaning robots operate on onboard battery packs between docking station charges. In both cases, the low transmit current of Semtech's LoRa ICs keeps the wireless module from becoming a meaningful contributor to system power budgets, regardless of the host platform.
No recurring fees and no cellular dependency: At 5,000–10,000 nodes per farm, cellular data costs become significant at scale. A private LoRa network, whether using a custom stack or LoRaWAN with a self-hosted network server, eliminates per-node recurring costs entirely. Equally important, solar farms are frequently located in rural and remote areas where cellular coverage cannot be guaranteed. A self-managed LoRa network removes that dependency entirely, giving operators full-fleet visibility regardless of local network infrastructure.
Regulatory flexibility: Solar projects are global. Semtech's LoRa portfolio spans sub-GHz and 2.4GHz bands for regional compliance. The ability to leverage a single chip covering all relevant industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands gives OEMs a path to a single SKU across markets.
Proven ecosystem and fast time to market: LoRaWAN is a mature, standardized protocol backed by the LoRa Alliance® and a global ecosystem of certified gateways, network servers and device manufacturers. OEMs building tracker controllers, inverter monitoring modules or cleaning robot coordination systems can source certified hardware, integrate pre-validated cloud connectors and deploy in a fraction of the time required by proprietary wireless approaches. For teams entering new geographies, the ecosystem also reduces certification risk and support overhead significantly. And for deployments that require longer range or more complex topologies, multiple mesh proposals built on LoRa are available, offering flexibility well beyond the standard LoRaWAN architecture.

Where Is the Solar O&M Market Headed Next?

The solar operations and maintenance (O&M) market is projected to reach $9.48 billion by 2025 and continue growing as global installed capacity expands. Within that market, the shift from reactive to predictive maintenance is accelerating driven by asset owner pressure to reduce the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) across aging fleets.

Industry analysts including Wood Mackenzie and BloombergNEF have documented double-digit annual growth in utility-scale solar installations globally, with India, China, the Middle East, and the Americas representing the largest growth markets. India is a priority market specifically as the government's target of 500GW of renewable capacity by 2030 is creating demand for monitoring solutions at a scale that wired sensor infrastructure cannot economically serve.

Key Takeaway: Wireless Monitoring Is No Longer Optional at Utility Scale

The shift from wired to wireless monitoring in solar farms is not a technology trend in search of a problem. It is a response to a real economic constraint. As farms scale, the cost of wired infrastructure becomes prohibitive, and the information gaps it creates become costly.

LoRa technology, and Semtech's portfolio of ICs spanning sensor nodes to gateway concentrators to cloud connectivity, provides the specific combination of range, power efficiency and regulatory flexibility that tracker, inverter and cleaning robot operations demand. The deployments are not hypothetical. Multiple OEMs have independently arrived at LoRa as the right answer for their specific product and market context. A significant factor in that convergence is the LoRaWAN ecosystem itself: the ability to set up a network quickly using certified, interoperable hardware, manage it through proven network server software, and scale it without recurring infrastructure costs has meaningfully lowered the barrier to deployment.

For OEMs building the next generation of tracker controllers, inverter monitoring platforms and cleaning robot coordination systems, the question is not whether to embed wireless connectivity. The question is which wireless technology fits the environment, the power budget and the geography, and an increasing body of field evidence points to LoRa.

To learn more about LoRa technology  and Semtech’s comprehensive  IoT solutions, visit Semtech.com or explore the extensive resources available through the LoRa Alliance.

Stay informed on the latest advancements in LoRa by subscribing to the LoRa Monthly Newsletter, and discover Semtech’s full range of LoRa products, case studies and technical resources to accelerate your next IoT innovation.

Semtech®, the Semtech logo, LoRa®, and LoRaWAN® are registered trademarks or service marks, and LoRa Connect™ is a trademark or service mark, of Semtech Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

200G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) Power, Reach and Loss: Real Numbers

Semtech Corporate Marketing — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Decision-makers evaluating linear pluggable optics (LPO) want numbers, not abstractions. If you're new to LPO, start with Blog 1: What Is Linear Pluggable Optics?, then come back here for the key quantitative parameters for 200G LPO deployment: power consumption by module type, optical reach, electrical loss tolerance, and host port calibration requirements.

200G LPO Power Consumption vs. RTLR and Retimed Modules

The power story is the primary commercial driver for LPO adoption in modern data centers. For 200G links:

Retimed Digital Signal Processor (DSP) modules: currently 23 to 25 watts per module; expected to reduce to approximately 20 watts with next-generation DSPs
Retimer-based Linear Receive Optics (RTLR / LRO) (transmit-side retimer only): currently approximately 16 watts; expected to reduce to 14 to 15 watts
LPO: targeting approximately 10 watts — well under half the current retimed figure

These are module-level figures. At the system level, cooling power scales roughly in proportion, so the total saving from switching to LPO is roughly double the module-level difference. On a 512-port switch built on the Tomahawk-6 generation, moving from retimed to LPO modules saves approximately 500W at the module level alone, climbing to nearly 1kW once cooling is factored in. Double the port count to 1,024, and those savings double as well.

What Is the Optical Reach of 200G LPO?

For 200G LPO, the current optical reach target is 500 meters, corresponding to a 3 dB optical loss budget. This covers the vast majority of practical data center link lengths.

Extension beyond 500 meters is feasible under the right conditions. With appropriate receiver sensitivity and transmit power, reach could extend to approximately 2 kilometers in a DR (low-dispersion) context — roughly a 4dB optical budget. Current standards target the 3dB / 500-meter envelope, and exceeding it moves from a reach problem into a power budget problem: more transmit power or more sensitive receivers, not simply longer fiber.

LPO Electrical Loss Budget: The Die-to-Die Tolerance

LPO currently targets 22dB die-to-die port loss — the electrical loss between the switch chip and the module die on both transmit and receive sides. Semtech is actively working to extend this to potentially 26 dBonce sufficient measurement capability confirms feasibility. For context, fully retimed modules operate with port losses up to 32dB, so LPO's margin is noticeably tighter. That gap shapes board design directly: platform teams targeting LPO compatibility need to hold their die-to-die electrical channels within that 22dB budget. It's achievable in a well-designed printed circuit board (PCB) layout, but it leaves less margin than a retimed deployment allows.

LPO Host Port Calibration: Requirements and Process

The goal is to ensure the host port delivers a correctly shaped electrical eye at the module input — right precursor and postcursor equalization matched to the CTLE in the module driver. The calibration procedure:

Insert a host compliance board into the switch
Set the required CTLE target for the module being deployed
Apply an equalizer with tightly constrained taps and no precursors to isolate the calibration
Measure output swing and verify correct eye shape
Confirm electrical channel losses are accounted for in the equalization

Once calibration is correctly performed for a given switch platform and module type, the switch can be software-configured to apply the correct CTLE settings on module insertion — enabling plug-and-play operation without per-port or per-module manual tuning.

What These 200G LPO Numbers Mean for System Design

22dB die-to-die electrical loss budget constrains PCB and channel design
500m / 3dB optical budget covers the vast majority of data center topologies
~10W module power enables aggressive port-density and cooling optimization
Host port calibration is a one-time per-platform exercise, not a per-module overhead

Frequently Asked Questions

Can LPO modules be used in existing switch platforms?

Yes, with calibration. The electrical channel must fall within the 22dB die-to-die loss budget and the host port calibration methodology must be applied. Platforms with generous loss margins for retimed modules may need channel assessment before LPO qualification.

Is the 22dB loss limit likely to be raised?

Semtech and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) are actively working to extend the target to 26dB. Designers should plan to the current 22dB standard while monitoring standards progress.

Learn more about the Semtech LPO Products.

Semtech^® and the Semtech logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

AI Data Center Basics: What Is Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO)?

Semtech Corporate Marketing — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Linear pluggable optics (LPO) is one of the most significant shifts in data center optical interconnect design in a decade — but the term still causes confusion. Is it a module type? A standard? A replacement for digital signal processing function or DSP-based optics entirely? This blog answers those questions from first principles.

The one-sentence answer

LPO is a high-speed, optical transceiver that uses analog processing to move the equalization burden from the module back to the host switch SerDes, eliminating the DSP retimer, reducing power consumption and enabling lower-latency direct connectivity in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data center interconnec t applications.

How a conventional retimed optical link works

In a traditional DSP-retimed module, the host switch SerDes transmits an electrical signal that arrives at the module degraded by the electrical channel. A DSP inside the module retimes, reshapes and re-amplifies that signal to drive an optical modulator and generate an optical output. On the receive side, the signal is detected with a photodiode and converted to voltage using a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). A DSP then retimes, reshapes and re-amplifies the electrical signal to clean it up before delivery to the host SerDes.

That DSP is powerful. It compensates for significant signal degradation and reflections. But it consumes substantial power — typically 23 to 25 watts for a 1.6T DR-8 retimed module at current data center deployments.

How LPO changes the architecture

LPO removes the DSP retimer from the module entirely. The module itself is substantially simpler. On the transmit side: a continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE) for input equalization, a driver and a modulator to generate the optical signal. On the receive side: a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and potentially a linear equalizer. No DSP, no retiming, no clock recovery.

The host switch SerDes — which already performs equalization for its own purposes — takes on primary signal conditioning. The module handles analog amplification and optical conversion. Through careful optimization of equalization down the link, this analog architecture delivers the performance required for 200G AI data center interconnects.

Why this matters: the power case

The power reduction is substantial. For 200G links: retimed modules consume approximately 23 to 25 watts today, expected to drop to around 20 watts with next-generation DSPs. LPO modules target approximately 10 watts — less than half. The intermediate approach, Retimed Transmitter Linear Receiver (RTLR), sometimes called Linear Receive Optics (LRO), sits at roughly 16 watts today.

Scale example: At 512 ports (current Tomahawk-6 generation), LPO saves approximately 500W at the module level and up to 1kW system-level when cooling is included. At 1024 ports, those savings double.

What LPO is not

LPO is not a passive module — it still contains active analog components. What it lacks is a DSP retimer with clock recovery. LPO is also not a universal replacement for retimed modules: high-loss electrical channels, significant reflection environments or deployments requiring maximum TXFIR flexibility may still favor RTLR or fully retimed approaches. The right choice depends on system architecture.

The emerging set of standards landscape

LPO is governed by an emerging set of standards. On the electrical side, the OIF CEI 224 linear specification targets 22 dB die-to-die port loss. On the optical side, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) sets requirements for 200G performance. The Linear Pluggable Optics Multi-Source Agreement (LPO MSA) Group — where Semtech is a founding member — combines both into a unified standard.

Frequently asked questions

Is LPO the same as an analog module?

Largely, yes. LPO modules use analog rather than digital signal processing. The key distinction from a passive module is that LPO still contains active analog components and requires configuration and calibration.

Does LPO require new switch ASICs?

Not necessarily new ASICs, but the host SerDes must be correctly calibrated to deliver the equalization LPO modules expect. This is a configuration and methodology question as much as a hardware question.

Is LPO ready for production?

Standards work is active and advancing. The calibration methodology and standards framework are sufficiently mature to support deployment planning today.

Advancing VBUS Protection for 48V USB Power Delivery with SurgeSwitch® Technology

Anindita Bhattacharya — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:00:00 GMT

The USB Type-C connector has become the universal interface of modern electronics. From laptops and smartphones to Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing platforms and industrial edge devices, USB Type-C supports both high-speed data transfer and high-wattage power delivery through a single cable. With the adoption of USB Power Delivery (USB PD) 3.1 and its Extended Power Range (EPR), (Table 1) VBUS line voltages have scaled from the familiar 20V/100W standard power range to 28V, 36V and 48V — enabling power delivery of up to 240W over a USB-C cable.

This evolution brings significant design challenges. Higher VBUS voltages introduce higher clamping voltage requirements for transient protection, and conventional transient voltage suppression (TVS) diode solutions designed for this voltage level have high clamping voltages that force designers to specify downstream components with elevated voltage ratings. Semtech's SurgeSwitch^® technology addresses this gap, and the new TDS5311P is purpose-built for 48V VBUS protection in USB PD 3.1 EPR systems.

Table 1: USB-PD Specifications

The Growing Threat on the VBUS Line

The VBUS pin in the USB Type-C connector carries the supply voltage to downstream devices being powered. This pin is also exposed to electrical overstress events, including electrostatic discharge (ESD), electrical fast transients (EFT), cable discharge events (CDE), and surge transients caused by lightning or power distribution switching.

These threats are not hypothetical. A single unprotected ESD event at the VBUS pin — caused by a charged user handling the connector — can damage or destroy downstream power management integrated circuits (ICs) and charging circuits. Surge events, which carry far greater energy, can produce destructive overvoltages across the entire input stage. No user wants to experience a damaged high-end computer due to an ESD or surge event. As USB PD EPR devices increasingly find their way into industrial and high-performance computing environments, the likelihood and severity of these threats grow accordingly.

Figure 1: Protecting the VBUS pin with a SurgeSwitch

Why Clamping Voltage Is the Critical Parameter

When a transient event occurs, a TVS protection device conducts and clamps the voltage at the VBUS pin to a defined level — the clamping voltage. This is the maximum voltage the system is exposed to during a surge event, and it is the most important specification for evaluating a protection device's effectiveness.

In conventional PN junction-based TVS diodes, clamping voltage increases with surge current and rises further with temperature, which means the device's worst-case behavior occurs precisely during the most demanding conditions. Additionally, downstream components must be specified to withstand those elevated clamping voltages which drive component cost and increase the required board area.

Semtech's SurgeSwitch architecture takes a fundamentally different approach. SurgeSwitch devices are built on a MOSFET-based topology that delivers a nearly constant clamping voltage throughout the full surge current range and remains stable over the operating temperature range. The result is a clamping voltage that is up to 30% lower than equivalent conventional PN junction-based TVS diodes, providing a larger safety margin for downstream ICs and enabling engineers to select components with lower absolute maximum voltage ratings.

Figure 2: Clamping voltage vs. Time comparison chart (TDS5311P vs. conventional TVS diode (SMBM58A)

Introducing the TDS5311P: SurgeSwitch for 48V VBUS Protection

The TDS5311P is Semtech's latest SurgeSwitch device, engineered to address the protection requirements of 48V VBUS lines in USB PD 3.1 EPR systems. Its working voltage of 53V provides the necessary headroom above the 48V bus rail, while its MOSFET-based architecture delivers the near-constant clamping performance that high-voltage USB designs demand.

Key Specifications

Parameter	Value
Working Voltage	53V
Reverse Breakdown Voltage (min.)	57V
Peak Pulse Current (8/20µs)	24A
Clamping Voltage (at Ipp)	63V
Dynamic Resistance	31mΩ
ESC (IEC 61000-4-2)	+/-20kV/+/-25kV (Contact/Air)
EFT (IEC 61000-4-4)	+/-4kV (100kHz and 5kHz, 5/50ns)
Surge (IEC 61000-4-5)	24A (tp = 8/20μs), 1kV (tp = 1.2/50μs, RS = 42Ω)

To illustrate the clamping voltage advantage in practical terms: a commonly used conventional TVS solution for 48V USB PD applications carries a clamping voltage of approximately 87V under similar test conditions. The TDS5311P's clamping voltage of 63V represents approximately a 24V reduction. This allows downstream components to be specified at a lower voltage tolerance, reducing both BOM cost and board space while increasing the overall design margin.

Figure 3: Semtech TDS5311P package diagram

Application: USB PD 3.1 EPR Systems

The TDS5311P is designed for applications where USB PD 3.1 EPR's 48V operating mode is in use. As shown in Figure 4, the TDS5311P is placed in parallel with the VBUS rail at the USB Type-C port entry point, providing a low-impedance clamp path to ground during transient events while remaining effectively invisible to the system under normal operating conditions.

Typical design targets for 48V USB PD EPR VBUS protection include:

AI laptops and computing devices requiring 48V USB-C power delivery for high-wattage system loads
High-performance docking stations where the VBUS rail powers multiple downstream devices simultaneously
Portable power stations and power banks supporting USB PD EPR output
Industrial embedded computing platforms with USB-C power input exposed to transient-rich environment

Figure 4: Simplified application circuit diagram showing TDS5311P placement on the VBUS line at a USB Type-C receptacle, with arrows indicating the transient current path to ground

Figure 5: Semtech SurgeSwitch Portfolio

Summary

While the fundamental requirement for USB VBUS protection has not changed, the limitations of conventional solutions have become more evident. Traditional TVS diodes, though widely used, suffer from drawbacks such as higher and variable clamping voltages as well as strong temperature dependence. These characteristics make them less suitable for modern high-power applications. Semtech’s TDS5311P SurgeSwitch addresses these challenges with a nearly constant 63V clamping voltage, 24A peak pulse current capability, full IEC compliance, and the inherent advantages of a MOSFET-based architecture — providing the performance and design margin needed for reliable USB PD 3.1 EPR systems.

To learn more about the TDS5311P or to explore Semtech's complete USB Type-C circuit protection portfolio, visit semtech.com/products/circuit-protection.

Semtech® and the Semtech logo are registered trademarks or service marks, and SurgeSwitch® is a registered trademark or service mark, of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

REX TCD 2026 – Connected and Sustainable Territories Event in Paris

Olivier Beaujard — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:00:00 GMT

France's municipalities are moving from pilot projects to full-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployments and REX TCD Retours d'Expérience – Territoires Connectés et Durables (REX Connected and Sustainable Territories) has become the annual proving ground where that shift gets measured. Olivier Beaujard, Senior Director of the LoRa^® Ecosystem at Semtech and Chair of the Board at the LoRa Alliance^® attended the 3rd edition of REX TCD, held on June 16–17, 2026, at the Salons de l'Aveyron in Paris. Here’s what the event revealed about the state of connected territory development in France, and why LoRaWAN^® is increasingly at the center of it.

What is REX TCD?

REX TCD — Retours d'Expérience – Territoires Connectés et Durables  (Connected and Sustainable Territories) — is the premier annual gathering dedicated to smart and sustainable territorial development in France. Co-organized by FNCCR, Smart City Mag and the Banque des Territories, the event brings together public authorities, private companies and associative stakeholders united by a shared commitment to the digital and ecological transformation of local territories. The 2026 edition marked the 10th anniversary of Smart City Mag, adding a milestone dimension to an already significant program.

A Growing Platform for Real-World IoT Decision Making

REX TCD 2026 confirmed its standing as France's largest gathering of local authorities advancing connected and sustainable territory projects. This year's program expanded to eight thematic tracks — up from six in prior editions — covering buildings, public lighting, water and waste management, mobility, natural risks, urban planning, and air quality. That expansion reflects the broadening scope of challenges LoRaWAN solutions are being deployed to solve.

The event drew over 500 participants, with local governments and municipalities representing approximately 50% of attendees — a clear indicator of growing public sector demand for practical, field-tested IoT guidance.

The LoRa Ecosystem on the Show Floor

The LoRa Alliance and its member companies played a central role in equipping attendees with the knowledge and tools to move from exploration to implementation with confidence. Nine Alliance members — Orange, MultiTech, Netmore, Itron, WATTECO, TEKTELIC, REQUEA, Fédération nationale des collectivités concédantes et régies (FNCCR), and Kerlink — exhibited on the show floor alongside additional companies demonstrating solutions using LoRaWAN technology, offering local authorities direct access to a mature, competitive and interoperable ecosystem.

Rather than a top-down technology pitch, the format prioritized peer learning: 22 concrete experience-sharing sessions from municipalities of all sizes across France covered wildfire detection, on-demand rural street lighting and AI-assisted waste management — giving attendees real-world evidence of what works, what doesn't and how to replicate success in their own territories.

Why LoRaWAN Resonated with Local Authorities in France

The reception was strong because LoRaWAN answered the questions local authorities are actually asking. Smart water management — the technology’s leading application in France — delivers measurable ROI that justifies network investment even for smaller municipalities. But the message that resonated most was scalability: once a LoRaWAN network is deployed for water metering or leak detection, it becomes the backbone for smart buildings, public lighting, waste collection, and parking — compounding returns on a single infrastructure investment.

Several structural advantages reinforced audience confidence and are increasingly decisive in procurement conversations:

Deployment flexibility — public, private or hybrid network options give municipalities control over their own infrastructure
Open standard — no vendor lock-in, with long-term technology assurance backed by a global alliance
Data sovereignty — local authorities retain full ownership of their data, a growing priority in French public sector procurement
Ecosystem maturity — over a decade of Alliance development means a rich, competitive choice of sensors, gateways and network management platforms

The Takeaway: LoRaWAN is Shaping the Conversation, Not Just Participating in It

REX TCD 2026 illustrated that the LoRaWAN community is not simply present in France’s connected territories conversation — it is actively shaping it. By meeting local authorities where they are, speaking their language and delivering peer-validated answers, the ecosystem is accelerating France's digital transformation from the ground up.

As municipalities continue to expand their IoT ambitions, LoRaWAN’s combination of openness, salability and proven ROI positions it as a trusted, future-proof infrastructure foundation for connected and sustainable territory development.

To learn more about LoRaWAN for smart city and territory applications and Semtech's IoT solutions, visit Semtech.com or explore the extensive resources available through the LoRa Alliance.

Semtech®, the Semtech logo, LoRa®, and LoRaWAN® are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates. Other product or service names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Semtech at ATxSG 2026: LoRaWAN Demos and Ecosystem Wins

Swaroop Chitturi — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:50:08 GMT

Asia has long been recognized as one of the most dynamic regions for Internet of Things (IoT) adoption, and the Asia Tech x Singapore 2026 (ATxSG) expo made that reality impossible to ignore. Semtech and the LoRa Alliance^® brought their full ecosystem to the event, and the reception was everything the team had hoped for.

Offering a rich representation of gateway manufacturers and end-node developers, the LoRa Alliance pavilion drew consistent foot traffic, meaningful technical conversations and at least one landmark business moment that signals just how far LoRaWAN^® has come in the Asia-Pacific region.

Here is a look back at everything that made ATxSG a milestone event for the LoRaWAN community.

Semtech participated in two key conference sessions as part of the LoRaWAN in Action World Tour. Rémi Demerlé represented Semtech on the LoRaWAN in Utilities Panel, speaking to LoRaWAN's role in smart water metering and monitoring of smart grid infrastructure with panelists from Netmore, Itron, WNES, Kerlink, and Sindcon. Semtech’s Olivier Beaujard joined the Smart Cities in Action Panel with speakers from TEKTELIC, RAKwireless, moderated by Matt MacDowell from MultiTech. Both conversations put LoRaWAN at the center of Asia's most critical infrastructure investment categories.

Rémi Demerlé moderating the LoRaWAN in Utilities Panel at the LoRaWAN in Action World Tour co-located at ATxSG

Olivier Beaujard speaking on the Smart Cities in Action Panel at the LoRaWAN in Action World Tour co-located at ATxSG

Semtech at the LoRa Alliance Pavilion: Demos That Drew Crowds

The booth earned the distinction of being the largest IoT booth at ATxSG, a reflection of both the scale of the LoRaWAN ecosystem and the quality of what the team put on the floor.

Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) Video Transfer: Live Video Streaming

The most popular demo of the entire event needed no elaborate setup to make its point. Using Semtech's Fast Long-Range Communication (FLRC) modulation, the team demonstrated live video streaming over Semtech LR2021, a capability that challenges conventional assumptions about what a low-power, long-range radio can do.

Visitors who approached expecting to see a blinking LED or a slow sensor reading were stopped in their tracks. Live video, streamed wirelessly, using Semtech technology. The demo consistently drew clusters of engineers and decision-makers who wanted to understand how it worked and where it could be applied.

FLRC pushes the data rate envelope, enabling higher throughput for applications that need to transmit larger amount of data without abandoning the long-range video surveillance, remote monitoring and situational awareness applications are all natural fits.

FLRC Audio Transfer: Walkie Talkie

Alongside the video demo, the team showcased two-way audio transfer over FLRC, effectively a walkie-talkie built with Semtech’s LR2021. Clear, real-time voice communication over long-range demonstrated the same core principle as the video demo: FLRC extends the tradeoff between data rate and range.

For applications like field operations, remote site coordination or emergency response in infrastructure-poor environments, an FLRC-based push-to-talk system offers meaningful advantages over alternatives that depend on coverage that may not exist.

Round-Trip Time of Flight (RTToF) Ranging Demo

The ranging demo offered visitors a look at LoRa^®'s distance measurement capabilities using the Round-Trip Time of Flight (RTToF) of LoRa signals to determine the distance between two devices. Ranging has applications across asset tracking, industrial automation, logistics, and indoor positioning, and the live demonstration gave visitors a direct, hands-on feel for the technology's accuracy and responsiveness.

One-Channel Hub

The One-Channel Hub demo rounded out the showcase with a practical, accessible entry point into LoRaWAN for developers and evaluators. A single-channel hub allows LoRaWAN devices to connect and transmit data without requiring the infrastructure of a multi-channel gateway, making it an effective prototyping and development tool, and a low-cost first step for organizations exploring LoRaWAN deployments or smart home consumer applications.

A Thriving Ecosystem, All Under One Roof

One of the clearest signals of a technology's maturity is the depth and breadth of its partner ecosystem. At ATxSG, that depth was on full display. The LoRa Alliance pavilion brought together partners spanning the full stack from gateways to end nodes to cloud-connected sensors giving visitors a complete picture of what a LoRaWAN deployment looks like in practice.

Kerlink rounded out the gateway showcase with two announcements that turned heads across the pavilion:

Kerlink revealed a fully autonomous gateway with solar panel and internet that uses either Starlink or Kineis for satellite backhaul, in conjunction with Edge Computing embedded into the gateway.
The signing of agreement with Integrasia, a division of the Djarum Group, one of Indonesia's largest conglomerates with over 35,000 telecom towers across the country. The agreement covers the first order of 1,000 LoRaWAN gateways.

The signing ceremony at ASIA TECH Expo of partnership agreement between Kerlink and Integrasia in presence of Semtech’s Olivier Beaujard and Rémi Demerlé

Browan Communications anchored the pavilion with a display of both their gateway and end-node portfolio, giving attendees a sense of the range of hardware available for network build-outs of any scale.

Dragino focused their exhibit on real-world IoT deployments, particularly in smart buildings and agriculture. Their lineup of temperature sensors, humidity sensors and other environmental monitoring nodes drew interest from visitors looking to understand how LoRaWAN performs in field conditions where reliable, low-power sensing is critical.

RAKwireless and MultiTech both brought their gateway and end-node products, reinforcing the message that LoRaWAN infrastructure is mature, widely available and backed by multiple competing manufacturers. An important signal for enterprises evaluating the technology.

Tektelic stood out with a broad sensor portfolio covering temperature, pressure and environmental monitoring. The highlight of their display was their 7-in-1 multi-parameter sensor, a single device capable of measuring a wide range of conditions simultaneously, exactly the kind of practical consolidation that makes enterprise IoT deployments more manageable and cost-effective.

Sindcon brought something different to the pavilion: gas and water metering solutions built around a retrofit module designed to sit directly on top of an existing water meter. It is a compelling approach to infrastructure modernization that does not require replacing hardware already in the ground. A critical consideration for utilities and smart city operators looking to digitize aging assets without wholesale replacement. Sindcon revealed a new partnership with DIEHL Metering to enable their retrofit LoRaWAN module for connecting water meters from DIEHL Metering.

Seeed Studio and the Edge AI Moment

Seeed Studio's Edge AI camera is pointed to one of the most important conversations in IoT today.

Seeed's camera node runs image analysis directly on the device. Rather than streaming raw video to the cloud for processing, the camera performs inference at the edge and transmits only the result. A classification, an alert, a count. The raw image data never leaves the device.

For LoRaWAN, this is a near-perfect pairing. LoRaWAN's long-range, low-power communication profile has always been optimized for transmitting small, meaningful payloads rather than high-bandwidth streams. Edge AI closes the loop: process locally, transmit intelligently. Seeed Studio's demo was a live, working proof point of that principle in action.

Looking Ahead

Asia Tech x Singapore delivered on every front: ecosystem visibility, partner engagement, commercial leads, and technical demonstrations that pushed the boundaries of what visitors expected from LoRaWAN. The Kerlink–Integrasia gateway agreement alone underscored the scale of opportunity in Southeast Asia, and the reception at the LoRa Alliance pavilion made clear that awareness and momentum in the region are building fast.

One thing is certain: LoRaWAN's story in Asia is only getting started.

Subscribe to Semtech’s LoRa Newsletter to know the first hand information of the innovation.

Join the LoRa Alliance: https://lora-alliance.org/membership/ or contact Semtech.

To learn more about Semtech’s technology solutions, visit our website.

Semtech^®, LoRaWAN^®, LoRa^®, LoRa Plus^™, and the Semtech logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Semtech Corporation and its affiliates. Other product or service names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Semtech Blog

LR2021 Long Range Demos at The Things Conference 2026

LR2021 Demos at the Semtech Booth

1. Long Range Image Transfer with LR2021 and FLRP-Burst

2. Z-Wave Assisted Video Transfer over FLRC on LR2021

3. Amazon Sidewalk Device Showcase

4. LoRa Alliance Network Discovery on LR2021

Keynotes: How the LoRa Ecosystem and LR2021 Extend Range and Data Rate

Amazon Sidewalk and LoRaWAN: Expanding Connectivity at Scale

Smart Water Metering Panel: Why LoRaWAN Wins the Connectivity Evaluation

How Does FLRP-Burst on LR2021 Deliver Long Range at High Data Rate?

Women in IoT Panel: Career On-Ramps and What Needs to Change

What’s Next for LoRa Plus and FLRP After The Things Conference 2026

Electronica India 2026: Smart Metering, IoT Modules, Protection, and Power Demos

Made-In-India LoRa "Wall of Devices" on Display at Electronica India

Network Discovery Combines Fixed and Walk-By Meter Reading Over LoRaWAN

Advanced Multi-Connectivity for Smart Water Meters: wM-Bus with LR1121

NeoCortec Brings DLMS Mesh Networking to LoRa Smart Metering

Image Transfer at Up to 2.6Mbps with LoRa Plus™ LR2021

Wi-SUN and LoRaWAN Run on One LR2021 Transceiver

5G Cellular IoT Modules for Every Deployment

Beyond LoRa: PerSe® Smart Sensing Demos in Action

Force Sensing: What You Can Build With Force Touch Technology

Device Showcase: Built With Semtech Force Touch, Displayed at the Booth

What Electronica India 2026 Signals for LoRa in India

Attendee Response and Industry Engagement

Strategic Market Position

IOTE Shenzhen 2026: Semtech and the LoRa Ecosystem Chart the Next Chapter of IoT Innovation

Inside the Semtech Booth: LoRa Ecosystem Innovation on Display

LoRa Plus Module Ecosystem

Featured Demos at the Semtech Booth

Partner Demo Showcases

Amazon Sidewalk Ecosystem

Video and Image Transmission

LoRa Connectivity for Edge AI Applications

Low-Altitude Network Applications

Accelerating LoRa Ecosystem Commercialization

Satellite IoT

Ecosystem and Partner Value: The Roundtable Discussion

Media Engagement

Beyond the Semtech Booth: LoRa Across the Show Floor

Looking Forward: The Future of the LoRa Ecosystem

Fast Long-Range Protocol Burst: Megabit Speeds Meet Kilometer-Range Wireless Links

Why FLRP Burst: Closing the Speed-vs-Range Gap

What is FLRP Burst?

Why combine LoRa and FLRC?

What FLRP Burst Delivers: Speed, Range and Efficiency

How Does FLRP Burst Work: Wake, Adapt, Transfer, Sleep

Phase 1: LoRa WOR Connection Setup

Phase 2: Adaptive Channel and Data Rate Selection

Phase 3: High-Speed Data Burst

Phase 4: Optional Data Integrity

Real-World Applications for Fast, Long-Range, Low-Power Wireless

Security Cameras: Alarm Verification

Firmware & Configuration Distribution

Battery-Powered Sensor Networks

Conclusion: A Faster, Farther, More Efficient Wireless Protocol

Frequently Asked Questions

What is FLRP burst?

Why does FLRP burst combine LoRa and FLRC instead of using just one?

What data rates and range can FLRP burst achieve?

How does FLRP burst save power between transfers?

What happens if a data transfer is corrupted or interrupted?

Closing the Solar Farm Monitoring Gap with LoRa® Technology

What Makes Inverter Monitoring So Difficult at Utility Scale?

Why Is Solar Tracker Monitoring So Complex?

The Cleaning Robot Monitoring Gap

Why Does LoRa Fit Solar Monitoring Better Than Other Wireless Options?

Where Is the Solar O&M Market Headed Next?

Key Takeaway: Wireless Monitoring Is No Longer Optional at Utility Scale

200G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) Power, Reach and Loss: Real Numbers

200G LPO Power Consumption vs. RTLR and Retimed Modules

What Is the Optical Reach of 200G LPO?

LPO Electrical Loss Budget: The Die-to-Die Tolerance

LPO Host Port Calibration: Requirements and Process

What These 200G LPO Numbers Mean for System Design

Frequently Asked Questions

Can LPO modules be used in existing switch platforms?

Is the 22dB loss limit likely to be raised?

AI Data Center Basics: What Is Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO)?

Image Transfer at Up to 2.6Mbps with LoRa Plus^™ LR2021

Beyond LoRa: PerSe^® Smart Sensing Demos in Action