Ignion, AVSystem and Memfault join Nordic Partner Program boosting Nordic’s cellular IoT ecosystem

Nordic Semiconductor has announced the expansion of its successful Nordic Partner Program with the addition of three new design and solution partners. The new partners will provide Nordic customers with access to an expanded ecosystem of companies with experience and expertise of the company’s solutions to help bring wireless products to market faster.

Launched last year, the Nordic Partner Program includes ‘Design Partners’ and ‘Solution Partners’ that can assist Nordic customers by providing products, services, and solutions that complement Nordic’s portfolio of short-range wireless and low power cellular IoT connectivity hardware, firmware, development tools, and reference designs. Joining the program are antenna innovator and off-the-shelf antenna solution provider Ignion; AVSystem, a leader in IoT device management and Lightweight M2M (LwM2M) Cloud connectivity; and Cloud-based remote debugging and monitoring specialist, Memfault.

Easing wireless development

“Developing cellular IoT or short range wireless technology can be complex, requiring a number of parties to help develop a product and bring it to production,” says Lorenzo Amicucci, Business Development Manager, Nordic Semiconductor. “As such we are delighted to welcome Ignion, AVSystem and Memfault to the partner program and appreciate that together we can help customers rapidly transform ideas into the connected products of the future.”

Design and solution partners

Design and Solution Partner Ignion’s ‘Virtual Antenna®’ technology is already deployed in more than 30 million devices worldwide—including the Nordic Thingy:91 cellular IoT prototyping platform. The small multi-band multiprotocol SMD antenna provides customers developing with the Nordic Thingy:91 or nRF9160 System-in-Package (SiP) the ability to bring their cellular IoT designs to market faster with robust long range, extended battery life, and in a compact size, even if they have no previous RF or antenna design expertise.

To get a head start, developers take advantage of Ignion’s free Antenna Intelligence Cloud service. Within 24 hours, users receive an antenna design customized for their device along with a simulation report including antenna efficiency graphs, easy tuning guidance, and design recommendations for optimal RF performance. The use of Virtual Antenna technology shortens the development process and Ignion guides the users through the antenna system design, integration and testing phase, avoiding design mistakes delaying product certification and time-to-market.

“Designing IoT products with cellular connectivity used to be challenging, but by leveraging Virtual Antenna technology from the start developers ensure reliable high RF performance,” says Johan Pedersen, Senior Director of Business Development, Ignion. “The partnership between Ignion and Nordic lowers the barrier to robust RF by providing powerful and easy to use development tools allowing customers to get their IoT design right on day one without being RF experts.”

New Solution Partner AVSystem’s lifecycle device management products ensure seamless interoperable LwM2M connectivity between Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK and AVSystem’s ‘Coiote IoT Device Management’ platform. Developers designing IoT devices based on the nRF9160 SiP can leverage AVSystem support direct from the nRF Connect SDK, making it simple to enable LwM2M connectivity on the nRF9160 SiP and connect to AVSystem’s Cloud service. 

This provides developers with confidence in the implementation of the standard and ensures product-ready support from the nRF Connect SDK and the Coiote IoT Device Management platform for building new IoT applications. Additional services and integrations will soon be added, including nRF Cloud Location Services which will be directly available from AVSystem’s Cloud platform.

“Many IoT applications once deployed don’t work properly or malfunction completely because of network configuration problems, supply power fluctuation, or because maintenance is a challenge for service providers, amongst many other causes,” says Artur Wróbel, Business Development Director, IoT, AVSystem. “With this partnership customers have unlimited access to their device in the field that is fully controllable, predictable and manageable with remote diagnostics from the first day of development until many years after deployment.”

Solution Partner Memfault’s firmware observability platform empowers IoT developers to remotely debug issues, deploy OTA firmware updates, and continuously monitor fleets of connected devices at scale. Nordic customers using the nRF91, nRF53, or nRF52 Series low power cellular IoT and short-range wireless solutions get free access to the Memfault platform by integrating their devices in minutes via the nRF Connect SDK, enabling them to accelerate product development and easily update products after release.

With Memfault’s automatic data extraction, fault analysis, and alerting capabilities, developers have full visibility into device and fleet-level metrics like connectivity and low power state, along with detailed firmware diagnostic information like stack traces and coredumps. With this information, developers can root cause issues with hard data and send over-the-air (OTA) updates to fix devices before end users notice and report any problems.

“As device complexity grows, more defects escape to the field, consuming increasing amounts of engineering and support resources,” says François Baldassari, Founder and CEO, Memfault. “Rather than relying on customer complaints and manually collected logs, Memfault's integration with the nRF Connect SDK gives hardware developers a scalable, reliable path to debug issues in the field, helping customers continuously iterate and improve firmware on deployed devices.”

• About Ignion
• About AVSystem
• About Memfault
• About Nordic Partner Program
• Meet Nordic at MWC 2022