STMicro forms LoRa chip partnerships with Semtech and Tencent

Swiss chip giant STMicroelectronics has announced a new partnership with Semtech, to create a system-on-chip (SoC) that combines one of the former’s STM32 microcontrollers (MCUs) with a LoRa radio. The single-chip offering for LoRa, the unlicensed low power WAN (U-LPWAN) technology, should catch developer attention, and a cooperation partnership with Tencent Cloud won’t hurt its Chinese ambitions either. Semtech, the owner of the IP behind the LoRa physical layer, was initially the only supplier of LoRa radio silicon. Licensing partnerships with Microchip and STMicro came later, expanding the choice of silicon providers for LoRa adopters – but always ensuring that Semtech got a royalty. Now, STMicro seems to have taken things a step further, in building the STM32WLE5 SoC –…