TI's CC430 Microcontroller Speeds Wireless Sensor Innovation as First System-On-Chip to Conform to ISO Standard

SAN RAMON, Calif., Dec. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- The DASH7 Alliance, a coalition of organizations promoting a standard for wireless sensor networks, today announced support for Texas Instruments Incorporated's (TI) CC430 line of radio-frequency (RF)-enabled microcontrollers (MCUs). The first RF system-on-chip (SoC) to comply with the DASH7 (ISO 18000-7) standard, the CC430 MCU family provides DASH7 developers with a robust and inexpensive platform for building DASH7 wireless networking devices and applications.

"DASH7's low power and excellent signal propagation provides CC430 developers with an optimized sub-1 GHz wireless sensor networking platform," said Scott Roller, general manager of TI's MSP430(TM) MCU platform. "The Alliance is making major inroads in its mission of encouraging the adoption of wireless sensor networking in both the government and commercial sectors. As an active member of the DASH7 Alliance, TI will continue to make products that are DASH7-compatible, helping developers decrease costs while speeding their ability to bring differentiated products to market."

The complexity of developing solutions that combine MCUs and radio technology is a significant barrier to widespread adoption. Traditionally, developers have had to build tags from scratch and contend with a range of issues such as hardware incompatibility and the fact that higher frequencies, such as 2.4 GHz, do not work well in environments with barriers such as water, concrete and metal.

"TI just took a lot of the pain out of the development process," said Patrick Burns, president of the DASH7 Alliance. "The introduction of a standards-based platform will allow developers to do what they do best - innovate and build creative applications."

The industry's lowest power, single-chip RF solution

The CC430 family offers the industry's lowest power, single-chip RF solution for MCU-based applications. By making RF design easy, small, performance-rich and power-efficient, the CC430 platform helps advance applications including RF networking, energy harvesting, industrial monitoring and tamper detection, personal wireless networks, alarm and security systems and automatic metering infrastructure (AMI).

The CC430 device is a monolithic sub-1 GHz RF SoC and can be designed into devices of smaller size and cost than ever before, including flexible assemblies. The performance of the CC430 MCU is also unrivaled, blending the high performance, ultra-low power MSP430 MCU core with up to 32 KB of FLASH memory and the popular CC1101 RF transceiver.

Supported by the easy-to-use MSP430 MCU tool kit, as well as RF design tools, the CC430 allows fast and efficient design-ins.

To enable DASH7 support, the CC430 uses OpenTag, the open source firmware available at no cost to DASH7 developers. OpenTag provides developers with a set of C libraries optimized for the CC430 and enables rapid development of new DASH7-based devices.

Developers interested in the CC430 should contact their local TI representative or visit www.ti.com/cc430. For a technical tutorial on DASH7, developers should attend the next DASH7 technical webinar by visiting www.dash7.org. OpenTag open source firmware is available at sourceforge.net/projects/opentag.

About the DASH7 Alliance

The DASH7 Alliance is a coalition of organizations from multiple industries that are committed to advancing the use and adoption of wireless sensor technologies based on the ISO18000-7 standard for active Radio Frequency Identification. Participating organizations include Analog Devices, Austria Microsystems, Dow, Evigia Systems, Hi-G-Tek, IDENTEC SOLUTIONS, KPC, Lockheed Martin, Michelin, Northrop Grumman, RFind, Savi Technology, ST Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments Corporation. The U.S. Department of Energy and three of its laboratories, the Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, as well as the University of Pittsburgh, plan to serve as technical advisors. Membership is open to end users, technology providers and research organizations. For more information, please visit www.dash7.org.

SOURCE DASH7 Alliance

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RELATED LINKS
http://www.dash7.org
http://www.ti.com/cc430