Texas Instruments has announced the availability for mass production of the lowest-power dual-band wireless microcontroller (MCU) supporting Sub-1 GHz and Bluetooth low energy connectivity on a single chip. This Wireless MCU can be used for long range connectivity (up to 20 km) paired with ultra-low power consumption that offers a sleep current of 0.7 uA which allows for more than 10 years of battery life using a coin cell battery. It can be used for building and factory automation, alarm and security, smart grid, asset tracking and wireless sensor network applications.
As part of their pin-to-pin and software compatible SimpleLink™ ultra-low power platform, the new SimpleLink dual-band CC1350 wireless MCU enables developers to move from a three-chip solution to a tiny single chip, while reducing design complexity, saving power, cost and board space.
Designed for low-power wide area networks (LPWAN), the CC1350 wireless MCU features:
- Dual-band connectivity that expands the functionality of a Sub-1 GHz network with Bluetooth low energy implementations such as beaconing, over-the-air updates, smart commissioning, remote displays and more.
- Enhanced integration in a tiny wireless MCU that combines a Sub-1 GHz transceiver and Bluetooth low energy radio, as well as an ARM® Cortex®-M3 core in a single, Flash-based, 4x4 mm QFN package.
Developers can get started in minutes with the low-cost SimpleLink LaunchPad™ development kit or connect sensors to the cloud in minutes with the SimpleLink CC1350 SensorTag demo kit supported by their Code Composer Studio™ integrated development environment (IDE) and IAR Embedded WorkBench®. Additionally, they have simplified development by providing multiple software options including point-to-point communication examples with EasyLink, a wireless M-Bus protocol stack leveraging TI RTOS, as well as the BLE-Stack 2.2 software development kit (SDK) which supports Bluetooth 4.2 specifications. Developers will also have access to online training and E2E™ community support to help ease their design process.
Currently the the SimpleLink Sub-1 GHz CC1350 wireless MCUs is available for 868 MHz, 915 MHz and 920 MHz ISM band operation in a 7x7 mm package. In the future TI plans to introduce MCUs for for operation in 315 MHz, 433 MHz, 470 MHz, 500 MHz, 779 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHz and 920 MHz and 2.4 GHz ISM bands and SRD systems, will be available in 4x4, 5x5 and 7x7 mm QFN packages.
