Small and cheap way to add RF (both RX and TX) capabilities to uC?

Question

Hi - I'm interested in finding a cheap and small (low pincount) way to add RF (both transmitting and recieving) capabilities to a uC. I've seen the Microchip RFPIC series

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and those are definitely of interest - but they have a rather high pincount for my purposes (18 pins is the lowest) and also they only have transmitting capabilities - and primarily right now I'm looking for a really small uC with recieving capabilities. And it looks to me like the matching recievers for the rfpic series are these:

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which are all in 32 pin packages - which is bigger than I'd like to deal with. I've looked at just using a small uC with one of the smaller Laipac RF devices

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- but that is bulky and expensive. The application is very simple and does not need much bandwidth at all. So does anyone have any reccomendations for me? Thanks!

Iain Tebbutt · Accepted Answer

I'm not sure that I know of any low pin-count devices but we did a project last year using Chipcon's CC1010 which is a 8051 micro with built in RF that supports 433MHz, 868MHz or 9xxMHz. You just need to add some inductors, capacitors and resistors and an antenna and you're done. The 8051 bit includes FLASH for program storage and the dev kit is supplied with libraries for the Keil compiler. We also considered some Atmel parts for this project (Atmel do lots of RF bits) but had problems getting samples/low volume parts for prototype quickly enough.

You don't say what bandwidth you want and what range nor what volume you are building in. In Europe the cost of certifying a design means that it's really only worth designing your own RF if you are in a quite high volume application otherwise look at ready-made and cerified RF modules.

Iain Tebbutt

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Small and cheap way to add RF (both RX and TX) capabilities to uC?

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