National Semiconductor Corporation announced the LMX3162, the industry's first single-chip radio transceiver for wireless voice and data applications that utilize the high performance 2.4GHz ISM (Instrumentation, Scientific and Medical) frequency band.

"2.4GHz is the next high volume consumer wireless band," said Chris Tubis, vice president of the wireless group at National Semiconductor. "Given National's technical leadership in the wireless market, it is natural that we would build a single-chip solution for these low cost and high volume data and voice applications."

The LMX3162 is an ideal RF transceiver solution for low power networking products that comply with popular 2.4GHz, slow frequency hopping wireless LAN (WLAN) and data protocols such as Bluetooth and HomeRF. Bluetooth is a proposed industry standard for the wireless connection of a variety of consumer devices such as PDAs, laptops, cellular phones, PC peripherals, digital cameras and wireless headsets.

With introduction of the LMX3162, National now also offers a complete solution for 2.4GHz DECT-like cordless phones. The chip can be used in combination with National's SC14402 for handset implementations or with the SC14422, an integrated baseband processor with embedded echo cancellation, for base station implementations.

"National is the market leader in delivering Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) solutions in Europe," said Arend van der Weijden marketing director of cordless products at National Semiconductor. "The LMX3162 builds on over five years of experience in the DECT market and allows manufacturers to quickly move to the next level of performance, by leveraging the existing infrastructure, such as baseband processors, for DECT designs."

LMX3162 Overview
The LMX3162 contains all the transmit and receive functions needed for a complete radio front end, including 1.3GHz phase locked loop (PLL), 2.4GHz frequency doubler, low noise amplifier, high frequency buffer, 2.4GHz low noise mixer, intermediate frequency amplifier, high gain limiting amplifier, frequency discriminator, received signal strength indicator (RSSI), and an analog DC compensation loop. In addition to the high level of integration, the LMX3162's single conversion receiver architecture and direct VCO modulation provide a low cost, high performance solution for wireless communications systems.

To accelerate customers' time to market, National's system integrator partner, RTX Telecom A/S, offers complete DECT and 2.4GHz development kits that include all necessary schematics, layout, software and documentation.

It would probably surprise a lot of people that National is so far ahead in the European DECT marketplace. It is not normal to associate the company name with RF at all. However, one of National's real strengths is in the development of good, but simple, PLLs -- the core of transceiver products that become successful. The company is absolutely correct that the 2.4-GHz ISM band is absolutely on the brink of an explosion; I'm not going to try and predict the winners in the development of home networks but the band is almost certain to be 2.4 GHz. It is an ideal frequency range for the task with fairly restricted transmission qualities -- so that we should not be concerned with home-to-home problems -- but it is a thoroughly stable and easily workable band.

The LMX3162 is a complete solution for building home network products and has extremely usable specifications. I am concerned about the "single-conversion" receiver -- which is presumably an alternative to saying heterodyne -- because it can be difficult to prevent re-radiation from the antenna. In this case the pre-amplifier should act as a fairly effective buffer but it may need to be a consideration when completing a system design; With simple voice transmission these things tend to be less important than the situation that may occur when throwing digital information around a house with, quite probably, multiple receivers.