Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Freescale Semiconductor Inc. has launched two low-power, 2.45-GHz integrated radios — one for proprietary applications, the other with a full Zigbee protocol and network stack, IEEE 802.15.4 compliance and support for star and mesh topologies.
Both target home automation, industrial control and wireless sensor networks and can be paired with microcontrollers ranging from 8 to 32 bits.
The standalone MC13191 supports point-to-point and star topologies, said Matt Maupin, a product-marketing manager in Freescale's wireless division. It targets designs where nonstandard software and other features can be added to improve security.
For full-blown Zigbee applications, the MC13192 transceiver contains an IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer and supports star and mesh networking. The Zigbee stack, including media-access control, network and application, is designed to be implemented on an accompanying MCU.
While the IEEE 802.15.4 standard encompasses bands used in the Americas (915 MHz) and Europe (868 MHz), Maupin said that Freescale's designs are solely for 2.45-GHz operation to support a larger, global market. Both radios comprise a complete modem with an over-the-air rate of 250 kbits/second using orthogonal QPSK modulation and direct-sequence spread-spectrum coding. Communication with the MCU is via a four-wire serial peripheral interface.
Power output is 0 to 3.6 dBm, and the practical line-of-sight range is 10 to 30 meters. The radios pull 1 microamp in "off" and 40 microamps in "doze" mode. Receive sensitivity is -91 dBm for the MC13191 and -92 dBm for the MC13192. Both are fabbed in 0.18-micron RF CMOS and come in 32-pin QFN packages.
The chips are available now. In quantities of 10,000, the MC13191 is priced at $2.28 each and the MC13192 at $2.70. A development kit that packs all the network protocol stacks needed for a full Zigbee design sells for $199.
By: DocMemory
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