According to the latest research from market research firm Counterpoint, in the fourth quarter of 2021, the global cellular IoT module market revenue increased by 58% year-on-year. Among them, 5G is the fastest growing technology with a year-on-year growth of 324%, followed by LTE Cat.1 with a year-on-year increase of 105%.

Cat.1 technology with mature technology, reliable performance, and competitive cost is used in medium-to-low-rate connectivity scenarios of IoT, and medium-to-low-rate terminals also raise higher requirements for Cat.1:

• Smaller size: The current Cat.1 modules are generally excessively large in size, and small-sized terminals such as trackers and smart employee cards have high requirements for the module size.
• Lower power consumption: In battery-powered scenarios, modules have high power consumption.
• Package compatibility: The current module manufacturers are competing with each other, and the packages are different.
• Stable supply: The short supply of MCUs raises higher stable supply requirements for modules that support OpenCPU.

To address the common pain points of industry customers, extreme simplification and integration are the general trend of Cat.1 evolution.

Neoway has recently launched the industry's smallest OpenCPU Cat.1 module N706, with the dimensions of only 15.8 mm × 17.7 mm, which helps the development and design of more size-constrained terminals to be more flexible.

As the industry's smallest OpenCPU Cat.1 module, N706 supports 13 communications interfaces, and can be mounted with peripherals, such as screen, camera, SD card, six-axis sensor, and acceleration sensor, which can better meet the requirements of PoC, POS, tracker, BMS, shared two-wheel vehicles, and other terminals. N706 supports graphical development interfaces, JS script simplified development, online hot update, and multiple built-in prototype cases in IDE (positioning, PoC, voice broadcast, and shared power exchange), which saves time and effort in product development and yields twice the result with half the effort.

N706 also maximizes low power consumption, reducing power consumption by about 15% compared with the previous generation of Cat.1 modules. It is very suitable for medium-to-low rate and low-power application scenarios, such as financial payment (sound box), logistics tracking (locator), and smart security (IPC).

N700 is an ultra-low-power-consumption Cat.1 module specially designed for financial payment industry. It can be pin2pin compatible with the N715 module, the star product of Neoway's previous generation of the financial industry. This helps it fully inherit functions and greatly improve its excellent performance on the basis of ensuring zero development by customers.

With the support of Neopipe cloud platform, N700 provides more stable and reliable high-quality communications for payment terminals in the POS industry.

N700 has been applied in batches, and Neoway has collaborated with leading financial payment companies to jointly empower the communications upgrades of the electronic signature POS industry.