The LoRa Plus chip supports multi-PHY connectivity, data rates up to 2.6 Mbps, and terrestrial and satellite links.
Semtech Corporation announced its LoRa Plus LR2021 transceiver incorporating fourth-generation LoRa IP was named a winner of the 2026 EDGE Award for Design Innovation. The EDGE Awards are presented by the Engineering Design & Automation Group of Endeavor Business Media to champion innovative technologies launched in the past year.
The 2026 EDGE Awards celebrate outstanding innovation in product design and function for the engineering industry. The LR2021 was named a winner in the Communications & Networks category. This award recognizes an innovation that received the most votes in a category from a Readers’ Choice poll.
The LR2021 was also recently selected for the 25th IoTE Gold Award – Innovative Product Award at IoTE Shenzhen 2026.
Designed for next-generation IoT
With over 500 million end nodes deployed worldwide, LoRa is the leading low power wide area network (LPWAN) for IoT applications. The LR2021 is the first transceiver chip in Semtech’s LoRa Plus family, incorporating fourth-generation LoRa IP with Multi-PHY compatibility that supports both terrestrial and SATCOM connectivity paths across sub-GHz, 2.4 GHz ISM bands and licensed L/S-bands.
The transceiver is designed to be backward compatible with previous LoRa devices, supporting seamless LoRaWAN compatibility, while featuring expanded physical layer modulations to support higher data rate applications utilizing innovative fast long-range communication (FLRC), which has a data rate of up to 2.6 Mbps.
Expanded architectural features
Other notable LR2021 architecture features include:
- Hardware Simplification: Single-SKU design eliminates the need for multiple regional variants, reducing inventory complexity by up to 70% for global manufacturers, and improved robustness to frequency offset allows lower cost crystals and design simplifications.
- Component Elimination: RF switch and TCXO are no longer required, reducing bill of materials (BOM) costs, PCB footprint and simplifying thermal management.
- Protocol Flexibility: Multi-PHY supports future-proof hardware investments as market requirements evolve.
- Application Expansion: FLRC’s 2.6 Mbps data throughput enables entirely new use cases — from basic sensor telemetry with firmware update over-the-air (FUOTA) capabilities, to AI-powered image and audio processing at the edge.
- Extended Coverage: Enhanced sensitivity and satellite connectivity options address previously unreachable deployment scenarios. Detecting four spreading factors in parallel with a single transceiver eliminates the power-versus-range trade-off in single-channel LoRaWAN gateways.
- Improved Power Efficiency: Faster, configurable channel activity detection (CAD) modes reduce idle power consumption and false detections.
- Interference Mitigation: Enhanced blocking immunity and configurable forward error correction, combining convolutional coding with long interleaving, improve resilience to burst interference, blocking, Doppler effects, and fast fading.
Customers and ecosystem partners are invited to visit Semtech at booth #XL2 during The Things Conference 2026, Sept. 22–23, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to learn more about the portfolio and meet with Semtech’s technical experts.
For more information, visit semtech.com.
