Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) introduced a highly integrated, low power RF transceiver for operation in the global 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) frequency band. As the latest addition to ADI’s extensive RF IC product portfolio, the ADF7241 RF transceiver is designed with emphasis on flexibility, ease-of-use characteristics and low power consumption. The highly integrated ADF7241 RF transceiver enables support of the standard IEEE 802.15.4 PHY protocol at 250 kbps on a single chip. The transceiver’s low-power consumption of 19 mA in receive mode and 21.5 mA in transmit mode makes it effective for battery-powered systems, such as wireless sensor networks, automatic meter reading, industrial wireless control, wireless audio and video, consumer electronics, and ZigBee® applications.

The receive path of the ADF7241 RF transceiver is based on a zero-IF architecture enabling best-in-class blocking and high selectivity performance, while the transmit path is based on a closed loop VCO modulation scheme, which provides a high modulation quality. It also features a flexible port RF-interface with support for switched antenna diversity. In order to optimize the system power consumption, the ADF7241 RF transceiver incorporates a robust, very low power, custom eight-bit processor that supports a number of RF functions, including radio control and packet management. The integrated eight-bit processor is firmware that can be programmed to execute firmware modules or system upgrade patches from internal RAM memory, which provides the flexibility to respond to protocol standard evolution and maintain system robustness.

The ADF7241 RF transceiver is equipped with a SPI (serial port interface) for high throughput efficiency as well as a bi-directional SPORT (serial port). The transceiver can be easily designed into system designs with ADI’s ADSP-21xx, SHARC®, TigerSHARC® and Blackfin® Processors.