Offering 60 Percent Lower Power Consumption than Nearest Competitor, New 2.4GHz Atmel AT86RF233 Transceiver Expands into Battery-Operated Applications Including Utility Meters, Industrial Monitoring and Control Systems, and Energy-Harvesting Equipment
Atmel Corporation announced a new RF transceiver for battery-operated wireless applications. The Atmel AT86RF233 transceiver is optimized for industrial and consumer products that comply with ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4, IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) and high data rate 2.4GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band applications.
Since target applications in these segments call for years of battery life without maintenance, a low-power, high-performance transceiver such as the AT86RF233 fits the bill. The AT86RF233 provides transceiver current consumption of 14mA, receiver current consumption of 6mA and sleep current consumption of 0.02uA. For a complete solution, design engineers can use a low-power, high-performance Atmel AVR or an Atmel ARM processor-based microcontroller (MCU)—two of the world’s most popular MCU architectures—as a companion chip. Together, the AT86RF233 transceiver and an AVR XMEGA MCU can deliver a low-power, cost-optimized solution to meet the operational requirements of applications that spend most of their time in low-power sleep mode and need fast wake-up times and short, active cycles.
As a highly integrated solution, the AT86RF233 requires minimal external components. Design engineers can, therefore, lower their bill of material (BOM) costs and also reduce system board space. With support for antenna diversity, the AT86RF233 enhances RF performance and link reliability. Onboard Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) ensures secure wireless end-to-end communication.
Design Environment
Supported by kits, tools and communication stacks, the AT86RF233 transceiver can be integrated into any design with efficiency. Designers who pair the transceiver with an AVR XMEGA MCU can further optimize their design environment with Atmel Studio 6, the newest integrated development environment. Supporting both AVR MCUs as well as Atmel ARM Cortex-M processor-based devices, Atmel Studio 6 comes with 1,000 project examples with source code that eliminate most of the low-level coding in a design.
Availability
The AT86RF233 transceiver is available with the REB233SMAD-EK evaluation kit, which includes two AT86RF233 radio evaluation boards paired with the AVR XMEGA ATxmega256A3 MCU. Atmel also provides, free of charge, a variety of network software and programming examples, including the BitCloud ZigBee PRO and the BitCloud Public Profile Suite.
