CubeWorks and Oxit Enable Real-Time Cold Chain Monitoring powered by Silicon Labs’ BG24
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With the global food market valued at more than $9 trillion by the World Economic Forum, feeding the world’s population is no small undertaking. It requires a sophisticated food supply chain that involves growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, and delivering food to consumers. Getting fresh produce and other perishable products from a farm to one’s dinner plate adds even more complexity around refrigeration, storage, and transportation time to ensure food doesn’t spoil. Real-time visibility into the location and temperature of perishable goods—from production to distribution and ultimately to the grocery store or restaurant—is essential to keeping food safe and the supply chain running smoothly.
Led by a management team with decades of cold chain experience, the CubeWorks™ team recognizes the importance of delivering a complete supply chain visibility solution. With its pioneering sensing technology, the company leads innovation within the cold chain industry and prioritizes reliable customer service. The company’s CubeWorks™ Tag, available to customers soon, is an IoT sensor for real-time location and temperature tracking. It is uniquely engineered for use in a wide range of environments, including inside sealed tractor-trailers, cargo containers, cold storage facilities, and walk-in freezers.
Designing a Next-Generation Tag Featuring Amazon Sidewalk
CubeWorks™ has a history of delivering ultra-low-power, ultra-small sensor technology solutions that deliver innovation to supply chain monitoring in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Connectivity plays a key role in delivering the real-time temperature and monitoring data needed to keep track of assets as they move through the supply chain.
When it came time to build a next-generation tag that offered even more power and improved connectivity throughout the supply chain journey, CubeWorks collaborated with Oxit, an IoT engineering design firm, as a research, design, and development partner; supporting architecture and integration planning to help enable Amazon Sidewalk connectivity on Silicon Labs’ BG24 platform. Together, along with Silicon Labs’ low-power BG24, they created the CubeWorks™ Tag, with access to Amazon Sidewalk. With end devices now able to access the low-bandwidth community network, the tag offers superior multi-connectivity options for more comprehensive coverage while perishable cargo is in transit. This allows CubeWorks™ to preferentially use Amazon Sidewalk when available, while continuing to rely on existing GNSS and LoRa CSS-based tracking services for country-wide coverage and high-accuracy location.
課題
Supply chain managers are under increasing pressure to reduce spoilage, prove compliance, and respond quickly to disruptions. Yet most perishable shipments still have costly blind spots. CubeWorks™ set out to integrate Amazon Sidewalk into its next-generation temperature and location tracker to address these visibility gaps.
ソリューション
Working alongside development and design partner Oxit, CubeWorks™ first introduced the CubeWorks™ NanoTag, followed by the forthcoming CubeWorks™ Tag, adding support for Amazon Sidewalk and leveraging Silicon Labs’ EFR32BG24 Bluetooth® Wireless SoC for Bluetooth connectivity required for device commissioning and operation, while meeting critical low-power requirements.
その結果
The energy-efficient, battery-powered CubeWorks™ Tag offers enhanced connectivity with Amazon Sidewalk, providing real-time visibility into location and temperature data, ensuring food and other perishables reach their final destinations in compliance with quality and safety standards.
Silicon Labs Low-Power SoC Module Ideal for Cutting Edge, Battery-Powered IoT Devices
Silicon Labs’ BG24 Series 2 Bluetooth® Wireless System-on-Chip was chosen due to its high performance and energy efficiency. Noted for its memory footprint, processing power, quick boot-up and go-to-sleep transitions, and ability to manage multiple stacks and communication channels, the BG24 SoC module was the ideal solution for optimizing the device for low power consumption.
As a longstanding partner of Oxit, Silicon Labs also stood out for its technical support, enablement, sharing of firmware, and culture of developer-friendly collaboration. As a result, the two companies were able to easily fine-tune the performance of the BG24 to bring to market a scalable and innovative design for the CubeWorks Tag.
Together, CubeWorks, Silicon Labs, and Oxit delivered a low-power design that expands coverage options while helping reduce the ongoing cost of supply chain visibility.
