Cost-effective ultra low-power sub-1GHz RF microcontrollers

Texas Instruments' (TI) CC1310 SimpleLink ultra low-power wireless microcontrollers are now stocked by Mouser. The cost-effective sub-1GHz RF device combines a flexible, very low-power RF transceiver with a powerful 48MHz Cortex-M3 microcontroller in a platform supporting multiple physical layers and RF standards. A dedicated radio controller (Cortex-M0) handles low-level RF protocol commands that are stored in ROM or RAM, thus ensuring ultra low-power and flexibility. The low-power consumption of the CC1310 device does not come at the expense of RF performance; the CC1310 device has excellent sensitivity and robustness (selectivity and blocking) performance. The very low active RF, MCU current, and low-power mode current consumption provide a long battery lifetime and allow operation on small coin-cell batteries and in energy-harvesting applications.