TI and Ember Team to Offer Low Power ZigBee Chipset Solution

(Top News, 10 Jul 2005)

Texas Instruments Incorporated has announced collaboration with Ember Corporation to unveil the low power consuming ZigBee networking and microcontroller (MCU) platform. Ember has paired its EM2420 802.15.4/ZigBee-compliant semiconductor platform with TI's MSP430F161x series of MCU for developing ZigBee applications that would require the lowest possible power requirements. The dual-chip network module provides MSP430 MCU, a radio and the ZigBee software platform for ZigBee/802.15.4 wireless sensing and control applications. The MCU series are claimed to integrate peripherals including high-performance analog and up to 55KB of flash memory, reducing the need for EEPROM, footprint and bill of materials (BOM). The device features on-chip, control peripherals such as a 12-bit 200k samples per second (ksps) analog to digital converter (ADC) and a 12-bit digital to analog converter (DAC) with a settling time of 1 microsecond. The series also offer low current consumption with 1.1 micro amps (uA) standby mode with real-time clock operation, as well as a 300uA (1 MHz) active mode that allows engineers to tune system clocking to meet precise power requirements. With instruction execution enabled by a 16-bit RISC CPU, a start-up time of less than six microseconds from standby and a fully synchronized, high-speed system clock, the chip's total power consumption is claimed to be 10 times lower than competing devices. CPU power requirements are also kept to a minimum by the DMA controller which allows movement of data from one memory address to another without CPU intervention. The DMA controller reduces system power consumption by allowing the CPU to remain in sleep mode without having to awaken to move data to or from a peripheral. The device also features a flexible clock system with five low-power modes and a zero power brown out reset (BOR).