Microsemi has announced the industry's lowest power Sub-GHz RF transceiver designed for secure iot applications

     Microsemi Corporation, a leading provider of differentiated semiconductor technology solutions in terms of power consumption, safety, reliability and performance, announced the introduction of an extremely low-power sub-GHz radio frequency (RF) transceiver for industrial, security and medical applications. In addition to the industry's best-in-class low power features, the new ZL70550 combines high-performance wireless capabilities, high integration levels and a very small package at a competitive price. The ZL70550 is ideal for wireless applications based on button batteries or energy harvesters, such as electronic shelf labeling, retail fixed asset tracking, process control, wearable monitoring, and diagnostic electrocardiograms (ECG).

     According to World Inc. 's latest market research, the chipset market reached 450 million in 2015, making the wireless sensor market experience "overdrive." While this market is dominated by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee solutions, many applications require very small batteries to run for years, requiring lower power consumption than these technologies.

     Francois Pelletier, Product Line Director at Microsemi, said: "In many medical and industrial customer applications, battery replacement is complex and costly, even exceeding the cost of the system itself. "We have successfully developed an intellectual property technology for pacemakers and hearing AIDS that require reduced power consumption to provide the lowest power wireless links that are easy to deploy with minimal form elements."

     The ZL70550 transceiver operates in the unneeded authorized Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band from 779 to 965 MH, consuming only 2.8mA of current while transmitting output power at -10 dBm and consuming a similar 2.5 mA of current during reception. This product offers the industry's lowest 10nA sleep state current, making it ideal for low-cycle applications. The ZL70550 is a flexible solution that can be customized to meet a variety of application requirements, operating at voltages between 1.7V and 3.6V, providing variable output power and data rates up to 200 kbps. For extended wireless range applications, it can adjust transmitter output power, receiver input sensitivity and data rate to achieve a link budget of up to -107 dBm while minimizing increases in device power consumption.

     The ZL70550 transceiver is a highly integrated product in a very small 3x2 mm chip-scale package. Except for antennas and in some cases matching networks, only one crystal oscillator, one resistor, and two coupling capacitors are required. The device includes an advanced Media Access controller (MAC) that provides most link support functions, received signal strength indication (RSSI), interference-free channel evaluation, sniffing, leading codes and synchronization, data packaging, whitening, and forward error correction (FEC). The Z-Star protocol option allows for rapid product development and offers a star topology configuration to allow the deployment of a comprehensive network.