R. Colin Johnson EE Times (03/01/2010 12:40 AM EST)

PORTLAND, Ore.—A family of wireless transceivers was mated to a line of ultra-low-power microcontrollers to create a family of a dozen wireless microcontrollers from Silicon Laboratories Inc. that debut Tuesday (March 2) at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany.

"Our new family offers the best of both worlds—a radio-frequency (RF) transceiver with a built-in power amplifier married to an extremely low-power high-performance microcontroller," said Mike Salas, director of business development at Silicon Labs (Austin, Texas).

Silicon Labs claims its ultra-low-power family of 8051-compatible microcontrollers already had the industry's lowest active current consumption, and its lowest sleep current. Plus its line of wireless transceivers already offered +20 dBm output power without an external PA and -121 dBm receiver sensitivity. Together with an on-chip dc-to-dc converter for operating at .9 volts, the new Si10xx family of wireless microcontrollers is claimed to increase the lifetime of the battery powered RF devices using it by five times.

The 12 members of the new Si10xx family of wireless microcontrollers all have integrated analog-to-digital converters and on-chip flash memory ranging from 8-to-64kbytes. Silicon Labs is targeting its new wireless microcontroller family at RF battery-operating applications such as home automation, smart meters, on-site utility monitors and security systems.

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