Alpha samples of Kinetis KW20 microcontrollers and MC13242 RF transceiver planned for Q3.
Freescale Semiconductor is expanding its Kinetis microcontroller (MCU) portfolio with the industry’s first wireless solution built on the ARM® Cortex™-M4 processor for smart energy, smart metering and building control applications.
Freescale’s new generation of Kinetis wireless solutions brings together performance and security in a scalable ZigBee® platform, allowing designers to optimize solutions to fit their specific applications.
Freescale designed the Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU family to address the increased processing and memory requirements associated with future ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 and Internet Protocol specifications. The Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU integrates an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a class-leading MC13242 RF transceiver and a robust feature set to provide a reliable, secure, low-power ZigBee platform. Designers can select the KW20 MCU single-chip solution or choose to combine the RF transceiver with a corresponding Kinetis MCU, giving them more flexibility to tailor the device to their specific application needs.
“The Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU provides the performance to handle smart energy applications’ memory and security needs, while giving designers the ultimate in flexibility,” said Bruno Baylac, director of Freescale’s Metering, Medical & Connectivity Solutions business.
“By integrating ZigBee connectivity with our award-winning Kinetis MCU family, we are helping customers future-proof their systems while gaining a higher-performance radio and extra security.”
The evolution of wireless connectivity
As the Internet of Things becomes a reality and more devices require wireless connectivity, processing and memory requirements continue to climb, and scalability becomes more important. With the Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU solution, designers can quickly make feature changes without going back to the drawing board. The KW20 wireless MCU provides greater processing power and larger flash and RAM options compared to other devices on the market, helping end applications avoid obsolescence as specifications evolve.
Freescale’s KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 RF transceiver provide leading RF performance by reducing power consumption and increasing link budget. The transceiver features antenna diversity, which improves RF reliability, especially for conditions where multipath interference occurs. The KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 transceiver are designed to reduce transmit and receive power, and a low-power run mode optimizes energy use.
The KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 are unique in that they offer dual personal area network (PAN) support, enabling a single device to communicate wirelessly on two ZigBee networks. This helps eliminate the need for multiple radios that in the past were necessary to connect different home automation and smart energy networks.
In addition, Freescale has integrated advanced security features usually found in higher-end processors to address the need for more advanced encryption methods, key generation, secure memory and tamper detect. Secure flash protects the code and data from unauthorized access or modification, while tamper detect can detect events and asynchronously erase Secure RAM and generate an interrupt so the application firmware can take additional actions, including a system reset. A memory-mapped cryptographic acceleration unit (MMCAU) supports a set of specialized operations to improve the throughput of encryption/decryption operations as well as message digest functions.
“Freescale continues its history of innovation for low power wireless solutions with the industry’s first Cortex-M4 based ZigBee wireless MCU,” said Robert DeOliveira, director of strategic sales at IAR Systems.
“IAR Systems was proud to be Freescale’s IDE of choice when they launched the first 32-bit ZigBee platform back in 2008, and we are pleased to continue that tradition by supporting their new high performance Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU. IAR Systems’ capability of creating the most effective code optimization has proven, once again, that IAR Systems development tools are the customer’s preferred choice for Freescale Kinetis Cortex-M based wireless platform.”
Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU features:
- Efficient ARM Cortex-M4 processor core
- Low power consumption
- Up to 512 KB of flash memory and 64 KB of RAM
- Cryptology accelerator and sophisticated tamper detect
- Integrated class-leading IEEE® 802.15.4-compliant radio
MC13242 RF transceiver features:
- High-performance IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio
- Low RF power consumption
- Best-in-class link budget
- Enhanced features include antenna diversity and dual PAN support
