Low power radio + microcontroller recommendation?

Question

I'm searching for a low power system-on-chip that combines:

• A processor (any achitecture)
• A radio (any frequency/bitrate/tx power)
• 2 or more I/O pins (ADC would be a bonus)

Can anyone recommend a device?

Which chip companies should I be looking at?

Answer 1

I would suggest a TI product. The MSP430, a low power microcontroller, combined with their transceiver line gives you:

The CC430

These chips can be very very effective. I currently use the CC1100 and the MSP430 and we have been wanting to make a hardware revision to switch to one of these very tiny SoC. They have AES support in most of them. TI has a zigbee stack available also, allowing you to plug-n-play-n-sell.

You will get many extra pins, ADC, SPI/I2C, UART. These chips can be the core of an overall system and add transceiver.

Answer 2

I've only read up on Atmel's stuff. They have the ZigBee line, with system-on-chip solutions: ATmega128RFA1. It has a 10-bit 330kS/s ADC, analog comparator, on-chip temp. sensor, <250nA sleep, max 14.5mA for Tx.

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=4692

Answer 3

I am very familiar with the MC13224V chip from Freescale Semiconductor. What's nice about it is that the balun and matching components are on chip, so all you need to do is supply a 50 ohm antenna.

I use the development boards from Redwire LLC.

http://redwirellc.com/store/node/1

Answer 4

I am a little surprised at how little overlap there is between the devices listed here and the list of radio transceivers for wireless sensor networks.

Forgive me for trying to read your mind, but I guess you plan to hook up that low-power radio to a battery and a sensor or two. Rather than re-design everything from scratch, have you considered buying an off-the-shelf wireless sensor node that already has all that stuff assembled and tested, or perhaps you could make relatively minor tweaks to one of the open-source wireless sensor node platforms?

Answer 5

If you just need a couple I/O, ANT's SensrCore might be all you need. It's essentially a prefab 2.4GHz module or chipset that can be set up to read a few pins and report on them over the radio:

Marketing speak: http://www.thisisant.com/technology/sensrcore

Powerpoint presentation

Datasheet

Answer 6

Freescale has the MC13213 and 13233 SOC systems which combine a ZigBee radio with an HCS08 microcontroller. The MC13213 has 60 KB Flash and 4KB RAM memory and sells for around $3.50 in 1K quantities. 8-channel, 10-bit ADC and lots of I/O pins.

Answer 7

Jeelabs.com -- Try the JeeNode 17.5eur with RF included, has adc included also used it happily for some time now there are very good developed libraries for low power usage (it can even run on 1AAA battery)

Answer 8

Something like an rfPIC?

Answer 9

Nordic Semi and TI.

Answer 10

I would suggest PICs and Zigbee chip or Microchip's version of it. CCS has some low-cost PIC development kits w/ wiresless. http://ccsinfo.com/product_info.php?products_id=wirelesszigb

For 1 one communication, I would suggest looking at the RFID radio chipsets and similar devices in that spectrum.

Answer 11

I used NXP Jennic JN5148 for a wireless sensor network application. They already provides Zigbee Pro and Jennet (Jennic's proprietary) libraries> You only have to build high level application using the libraries. The microcontroller and radio is integrated, so the consumed space would be smaller. The IDE is Eclipse and you can download program into the microcontroller using generic USB-serial (prolific or FTDI). They also have module version if you do not want to struggle with RF design. Quick search on Digikey shows that these modules is the cheapest here