Nexite Is Bringing Retail Merchandise to Life

In today’s world full of cumbersome scanners, manual processes, and close to no data, the Nexite team is bringing a continuous stream of real-time data about merchandise to customers. They’re covering the full story of every product, from the first stitches in the factory to its final destination in the wardrobe of a customer. And Cadence is helping them tell that story.

Nexite’s Nano BT tag provides battery-free long-range communication. It’s the first of its kind to transmit Bluetooth signals using harvested radio energy from a range of up to 10 meters, enabling completely automated operation with no manuals. The tag also includes an anti-theft mechanism, providing the same level of security as today’s security buzzers.

Working with harvested energy is a challenge, though, as everything must be ultra-low power. Everything from the clock, current reference, and even consistency of the logic circuits must be stretched to the extreme. Since there aren’t any standard cell libraries characterized at Nexite’s process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) conditions, they had to get creative. This is where Cadence’s Liberate Characterization Portfolio came into play.

Nexite took a mix of cells from the standard TSMC library as well as some of their custom designs and got to work. TSMC has qualified the Liberate portfolio and provides the library characterization kit for their specific process nodes. This greatly simplified things for Nexite and made sure they had the right conditions to characterize. In addition, the Liberate portfolio using Cadence's Spectre Simulation Platform as its circuit simulator meant that their digital simulations would match the analog side perfectly.

Lior Shakedd, Nexite’s co-founder and CTO, said, “Overall, this flow saved us around three months of effort and helped reduce the digital power consumption by 30% or so. We're now starting work on our third design, again using Cadence Liberate and Spectre [technologies] to their fullest capabilities with the target of 3X silicon cost reduction while increasing performance and adding features.”

“Designed with Cadence” is a series of videos that showcases creative products and technologies that are accelerating industry innovation using Cadence tools and solutions. Learn more about how Nexite is bringing retail merchandise to life with Cadence.