The investment is to complement Emerson’s plans for WirelessHart and the development of its IIoT product portfolio. Emerson led the development of WirelessHart as an open standard in the 2000s, establishing it as a wireless protocol for industrial applications. Integration of Spearix technology is expected to improve co-existence and spectral efficiency, provide larger network support to reduce total cost of ownership, offer higher data rates to accommodate devices and provide redundancy for critical applications.
Based in Cedar Park, Texas, Spearix’s product offering is a multi-core radio processor and associated software that is said to adapt to optimise performance and power based on measured environmental conditions.
According to Emerson, the technology has been shown to improve the connection reliability of industrial protocols while operating under heavy interference induced by high-power, high-bandwidth pervasive Wi-Fi operation.
Thurston Cromwell, vice president of development and innovation, and head of Emerson Ventures, says: “As the IIoT grows, billions of sensors and radio frequency (RF) transceivers will operate near others in low-cost, unlicensed RF bands. Wireless networks are increasingly challenged by a variety of RF aggressors, which can impact reliability and range. We believe technologies like what Spearix is building have promise in overcoming the obstacles caused by interference and congestion. Emerson will realise even greater reliability and range through the implementation of Spearix technology into our robust industrial wireless mesh network portfolio and associated software products. Spearix technology also presents an enormous opportunity to significantly improve the performance of many other wireless communication protocols.”
Laura Schafer, vice president and general manager, pervasive sensing and connectivity solutions at Emerson, said: “Emerson Ventures’ investment will enable Spearix to drive its advanced RF and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architectures forward and continue to deliver solutions that resolve connectivity issues in harsh and congested RF environments. This technology offers a novel hardware and software approach that has the potential to significantly improve performance while preserving investments made in existing communication protocols.”
Aside from the investment, Emerson has also entered into an engineering collaboration agreement with Spearix.