RF Micro Devices expands product portfolio featuring Ember ZigBee technology

GREENSBORO & BOSTON, USA: RF Micro Devices Inc. unveiled the highly integrated RF6555 ZigBee front end module (FEM). The RF6555 is RFMD's newest ZigBee FEM and is optimized for smart energy/advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) applications providing utilities and consumers more control over how they monitor and save energy.

ZigBee is a global low power wireless networking standard for monitoring and control across a variety of applications, including energy management, safety and security, home automation, lighting, and electrical appliances.

The highly integrated RF6555 combines the power amplifier (PA), harmonic transmit filtering, and low noise amplifier (LNA) with bypass mode in a single 5mm x 5mm x 1mm package, enabling customers to shrink product footprint, accelerate product time-to-market, lower bill of material (BOM) costs, and reduce power consumption for Smart Energy and Home Area Network (HAN) applications.

RFMD's RF6555 is ideally suited for battery operated smart grid and smart energy applications, such as smart meters, demand response, and HAN devices. The RF6555 is also suited for industrial and other wireless sensing and control applications requiring low power consumption, high performance, and proven reliability.

RFMD's RF6555 operates with Ember's EM300 Series chips – the EM351 and the EM357, in both system-on-chip (SoC) and network co-processor modes, as well as with Ember's EM250 SoC and EM260 network co-processor.

Bob Van Buskirk, president of RFMD's Multi-Market Products Group (MPG), said: "RFMD is pleased to collaborate with Ember to deliver highly integrated, high performance ZigBee solutions that reduce our customers' design cycle times, lower product BOM costs, and accelerate product time to market. Industry analysts forecast global smart energy deployments will continue to grow rapidly, with particular demand anticipated in low-power wireless networking technologies like ZigBee."

Ember's ZigBee networking systems – chips, ZigBee protocol software and tools – simplify the complexity of integrating embedded software, networking and RF for developing low power, wireless products in smart energy, connected home and other remote monitoring and control applications. Since its inception, Ember has been an industry leader and the most deployed ZigBee platform in the market.

The EM300 Series is Ember's next-generation ZigBee chip family, and the world's foremost ARM Cortex-M3 based ZigBee SoC, packing the industry's highest wireless networking performance and application code space into the lowest power-consuming chip set. The EM250 and EM260 are the most deployed family of ZigBee semiconductors. Ember's ZigBee semiconductors are renowned for delivering excellent RF performance, sensitivity and transmit power for long range, and 802.11 immunity.