Silicon Labs offers a complete 8051 MCU portfolio which is ideally suited to the EZRadioPRO product family. The F9xx family includes features such as a 65 mW power supply, allowing both EZRadioPRO and the MCU to operate off a single 0.9 V power supply, and optimized low power modes to maximize battery life.

EZRadioPRO’s system partitioning reduces the MCU burden by including automated features such antenna diversity, packet construction, packet decoding and packet qualification as well as TX/RX FIFOs, wakeup timers, battery and temperature sensors. Removing these functions from the MCU reduces microcontroller ‘on-time’, saving power, and increasing battery life. In addition, the microcontroller can focus on the system application rather than radio house keeping tasks, saving memory and MIPS, and allowing the use of a lower cost MCU.

Through the close collaboration between Silicon Labs’ wireless and MCU product groups, a library of 8051-based reference code is available for the EZRadio/EZRadioPRO products.  The available code includes sample radio code (to demonstrate basic part configuration and operation), EZMac (a networking layer for the creation of multi-node networks), and frequency hopping (allows customers to legally broadcast at higher powers or achieve improved blocker immunity).

Silicon Labs networking layer, EZMac, is constructed in a manner that enables optimal code size depending on the functions the customer needs to implement.  Customers can enable support for multicast, error detection, and packet forwarding. EZMac provides internal baud rate generation, data quality detection, and frequency redundancy to provide immunity against blockers.  EZMac is a lightweight networking layer which varies in size from 2 to 6 K depending on selected features used.

To legally transmit at higher output levels or increase immunity against signal blockers frequency hopping can be used. Frequency hopping is used to synchronize transmitters and receivers as they hop across multiple frequency channels.

The wireless and MCU software development tools, WDS and the MCU IDE have been modified to interoperate and simplify the design flow for customers by allowing wireless device configuration files to be exported directly from the WDS chip Configurator to the MCU IDE. Additional utilities allow customers to calculate range, battery life, and other key radio parameters.