Atmel Corporation announced the availability of the AT86RF212 800/900 MHz IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceiver for low power wireless applications, including ZigBee. Designing products with the AT86RF212 chipset enables battery operated devices to run for many years on a single battery because of the AT86RF212's low current consumption in both active and in sleep mode. To support the wide range of wireless applications requested by the market, AT86RF212 handles multiple data rates.

    The AT86RF212 offers an industry best RF performance with a link budget of up to 120 dB in the 800 MHz and 900 MHz ISM bands available in Europe and North America, respectively. The current consumption in receive mode is 9 mA and the consumption in transmit is 17 mA at a power output level of 5 dBm. The sleep mode current consumption is down to 0.2 uA.

    The link budget is the result of the -110 dBm sensitivity offered by the device and the maximum output power of +10 dBm. The extremely high link budget combined with the reduced path loss in the 800/900 MHz enables long range wireless communication without the use of costly external LNA or PA. Security is handled by an AES 128-bit onboard hardware engine. The security engine improves the overall system power efficiency and timing. The stand-alone 128-bit AES engine can be accessed in parallel to all PHY operational transactions and states using the SPI interface.

    "Selecting a 800/900 MHz radio chip for your wireless applications gives you a range benefit of nearly 3 times compared to a 2.4 GHz device due to the reduced path loss on the lower frequencies," said Magnus Pedersen, Director of Wireless MCU Product Marketing at Atmel. "Adding the benefit of the extremely high link budget of the AT86RF212, the device outperforms most solutions available in the industry today by as much as 10 times the range. This has been confirmed by initial range tests performed by our partner MeshNetics, showing an outdoor range of about 6 km without the use of any external LNA's or PA's," he added.

    The AT86RF212 is a true SPI-to-antenna solution. RF-critical components except the antenna, crystal, and de-coupling capacitors are integrated on-chip. MAC and AES hardware accelerators improve overall system power efficiency and timing. The 20/40 Kbit/s and 100/250 Kbit/s supported by the device is compliant to IEEE 802.15.4-2006. High speed data rates such as 200/400/1000 Kbit/s are also supported enabling wireless applications demanding more bandwidth. Atmel wireless solution is made of radio devices and microcontrollers such as AVR offering the best-in-class combination of performance and low power consumption required for such applications.

    "Atmel is our long-standing silicon partner, and we are pleased to pair their best-in-class AT86RF212 transceiver with our BitCloud ZigBee PRO Feature Set software on our ZigBit 900 RF module for sub-1 GHz band," said Alexey Rybakov, Managing Director of MeshNetics' ZigBit Business Unit. "MeshNetics is a ZigBee House that offers easy-to-integrate RF modules, ZigBee software and engineering services for OEMs and system integrators. By using the industry-leading silicon from Atmel, we can offer our customers high quality ZigBee modules and development tools."

    A set of firmware and applications notes has been prepared for AT86RF212 to shorten time to market for the Atmel customers. This includes low-level drivers for simple wireless applications, IEEE 802.15.4 MAC for standard compliant solutions as well as solutions for ZigBee. Updated firmware and documentation are available from the web pages of Atmel and partners. Samples of the new AT86RF212 are available now in Pb-free QFN32 packages, measuring only 5mm x 5 mm. Pricing starts at US $3.21 in 10k-piece quantities.