ALISO VIEJO, CA -- Microsemi Corporation announces its extremely low power sub-GHz radio frequency (RF) transceiver for industrial, security and medical applications. In addition to its best-in-class low power characteristics, the new ZL70550 combines high performance wireless capability, a high level of integration and an extremely small footprint at competitive pricing. The ZL70550 is well-suited for wireless applications operating on coin-cell batteries or energy harvesters, such as electronic shelf labels, retail asset tracking, process control, wearable monitoring, medical diagnostics and ECG.
With annual chipset volumes reaching 450 million in 2015, the wireless sensor market is experiencing "hypergrowth" according to On World Inc.'s recent market study. Although this market is dominated by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee solutions, many applications require much lower power characteristics in order to operate for years on very small batteries.
Operating in the 779-965 megahertz (MHz) unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) frequency bands, the ZL70550 consumes only 2.8 milliamps (mA) while transmitting at -10 decibel-milliwatts (dBm) output power and a similar 2.5 mA during reception. It offers the industry's lowest sleep state current of 10 nanoamperes (nA), making it ideal for low-duty cycle applications. As a flexible solution that can be tailored to various application requirements, the ZL70550 operates between 1.7 volts (V) to 3.6 V and offers variable output power and data rates up to 200 kilobits per second (kbps). For applications that require extended wireless range, the transmitter output power, receiver input sensitivity and data rate can be adjusted to give a link budget up to -107 dBm while minimally increasing the power consumption of the device.
The ZL70550 is highly integrated and offered in a very small 3x2 mm chip scale package. Other than the antenna and, in some cases, its matching network, only a crystal, resistor and two coupling capacitors are required.
The device includes an advanced media access controller (MAC) that performs most link support functions, received signal strength indications (RSSI), clear channel assessment, Sniff, preamble and synchronization, packetization, whitening and forward error correction (FEC). The Microsemi optional Z-Star protocol enables rapid product development and offers a full star configuration to allow a full network to be deployed.
Development Tools for the ZL70550
Microsemi offers a wireless sensor network (WSN) evaluation kit and an application development kit (ADK) to ease and accelerate hardware and software development. The evaluation kit includes one USB hub and one accelerometer sensor node and demonstrates a wireless sensor network application using the ZL70550's built-in Z-Star protocol. The ADK provides all the necessary hardware and software to demonstrate the performance of the ZL70550 and is intended to be used as a tool to support prototype development.
Product Availability
Samples and evaluation kits of the ZL70550 are available now, with the ZL70550 available in a 5x5 mm QFN or 3x2 mm CSP package. The ZLE70550BADB WSN evaluation kit is priced at $200.
For additional product information, visit:
http://www.microsemi.com/products/ultra-low-power-wireless/sub-ghz-radio-transceivers
http://www.microsemi.com