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Product Review

Micrel MICRF001 300-450 MHz Receiver

Micrel Announces CMOS Single-Chip RF Receiver

The manufacturer says . . .

Chipcenter's Paul McGoldrick says . . .

The MICRF001 employs a unique patent-pending technology to integrate a complete radio receiver onto a single silicon chip. Additionally, this new architecture eliminates the need for the manual tuning required to optimize the performance of competing solutions. This IC not only offers competitive and sometimes superior performance, as compared to existing systems, but also allows a user to reduce system costs by over 50%.

Operating in the 300MHz to 450MHz UHF frequency range, the MICRF001 provides several unique benefits:

Reduced manufacturing costs with the elimination of manual tuning and reduced parts count (from as many as 40 to only 4)

Inexpensive, non-precise LC transmitters can be used in conjunction with MICRF001

RF design "black magic" is eliminated, facilitating fast time-to-market

Regulatory compliance is eased by virtually eliminating RF antenna re-radiation

A seamless interface to standard decoders and microprocessors

Range performance is comparable, if not superior, to existing systems today

Serving the high growth wireless data communications market, key applications are in remote actuation systems, such as garage door openers, keyless entry systems (RKE), consumer wireless remote controls, DSS remote systems, remote lighting controls, remote control security, and home security.

The MICRF001 enables users to achieve wireless operation at ranges up to 500 feet and complete their design in 30 days or less. "This is a major event," says Lou Scalzo, Micrel's Director of Custom Product Sales, "This is a first for the IC industry. Presently this type of radio performance can only be achieved using many discrete components, a variety of manually tuned circuits, and/or the use of expensive SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) filters. And, inexpensive transmitters can now be used with no performance penalty." The MICRF001 was developed under a partnership agreement with AIT of Orlando, Florida

"We consider Micrel's RF technology an enabling technology, and have already begun work to drive performance and integration in derivative products," says Ray Zinn, CEO of Micrel.

That "this is a major event" is certainly a truism for Micrel. Crossing the threshold into RF is a big step for an analog company to take and this is an extremely interesting and useful first product. If you have ever looked at the RF output spectrum of a product such as a garage door opener -- using an LC transmitter -- you would be horrified at the quality of the signal, the stability and the amplitude fluctuations. The ideal receiver for such a transmitter has conventionally been a wide-banded front-end with plenty of gain margin and the set up was to tune the remote's inductor until it was -- more or less -- at the right place. For a time I lived in Santa Barbara, and when President Reagan was in residence at his ranch outside town there were daily stories of garages opening and closing by themselves as a result of White House communications work on some strange channels; those days are past thanks to digital IDs on the transmissions from products such as door openers and it is certainly the right time to get into the really simple receiver business.

Micrel seem to have gone about the task in a decent manner heading towards simplicity and ease of design for the OEM while reducing the component count quite dramatically. Really the only hurdle that I see for it to take a good slab of the market is to be welcomed and recognized as RF-competent by the design community -- and that will be up to Micrel by getting working parts into the right hands with good applications support. The company may believe that it has removed the RF "black magic" with the part but it will be surprised. It will also be really interesting to see where else the company is going to go in this field, perhaps on other non-license bands and uses.

The MICRF001 is available in a 14-pin DIP and a 14-pin SOIC and is priced at $3.00 in 1000-piece lots. Both samples and production quantities are shipping.

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