Date: 07/03/2011

ARM Cortex-M0 based system-on-chip (SoC) radios from Energy Micro

Energy Micro has announced advance details of its forthcoming energy friendly radio (EFR) product family as a complementing devices for its EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers. Energy Micro claims EFR4D Draco consume only 25% of the energy of competing products. Based on an ARM Cortex-M0 core, Draco system-on-chip (SoC) radios will achieve receive and transmit current consumption as low as 5mA and 6mA respectively.

EFR4D Draco product family will be offering users 3 alternative and cost effective radio device implementations: transceiver only, supported by EFM32 for protocol stack and user application; combined transceiver and protocol stack, supported by EFM32 for user application; and complete SoC solution, integrating transceiver, protocol stack and user application in a single EFR4D. The first transceiver only and SoC products are scheduled to be sampling during Q4'2011. Pricing will start at $1.1 each in 100k quantities.

EFR4D can handle maximum output power of +17dBm at 868MHz for example, receive sensitivity of typically -121dbm, FSK 1.2kbps and high receiver selectivity, blocking and image rejection capability. EFR4D will also be handling more frequency bands and radio protocols spanning the complete RF spectrum between 167MHz and 2500MHz and will support radio protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth LE and Wireless M-Bus. EFR will also readily suit customers' proprietary protocols.

Energy Micro has also released its first version of Simplicity Studio, a complete software console providing instant access to all the tools, documentation, software and other resources needed in the development of systems based on its energy friendly EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers.