RFaxis has announced a family of ultra-miniature sub-GHz RF Front-End IC (RFeIC™) products for the high growth IoT / M2M market. The new RFX15xx-series of products bolsters the strong portfolio of RF front-end ICs for IoT with these additional high power RF front-end options for sub-GHz applications. There is tremendous opportunity for RF front-ends in the high-growth smart home, smart office, smart building, and smart city segments. This expanded IoT portfolio helps enable a wide range of ultra-compact, high performance, and cost competitive designs.
The RFX15xx-series is a family of sub-GHz RFeICs™ in an ultra-miniature 2.5x2.5mm QFN package, a smaller size option to the existing RFX10xx-series of products. This series is intended for use in the 700/800/900MHz spectrum for high power Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) frequency band applications, including IEEE 802.15.4/4g, Wireless M-Bus, Smart Utility Network (SUN), IEEE 802.11ah Wi-Fi HaLow, and a host of other low-power wide area networking (LP-WAN) connectivity technologies such as LoRa®, SigFox, Weightless™, and Narrowband Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT).
The RFX15xx family consists of the RFX1510, RFX1530, and upcoming product derivatives, to be announced soon. The RFX1510 comes integrated with a high power high-efficiency linear power amplifier (PA) with 27 dBm saturated power, low noise amplifier (LNA), and Transmit/Receive switching circuitry. Similarly, the RFX1530 comes integrated with a high power high-efficiency linear PA with 30 dBm saturated output power, LNA, and Transmit/Receive switch. Both come with an integrated directional power detector circuitry, associated matching networks, RF decoupling and harmonic filters, all in single-die, single-chip bulk CMOS technology. They share a common pin-out in a 16-lead plastic QFN package. Like any of the RFaxis RFeIC’s™, they are available in bare die form for ultra-compact designs such as system-in-package (SIP) modules. These devices are rated up to 125°C ambient temperature required by most wireless sensor networks applications at high temperature and harsh outdoor environments.
As wireless connectivity for IoT and M2M continues to grow, the need for high-performance, yet simple and cost-effective RF front-end solutions is becoming increasingly critical. The total IoT / M2M wireless connectivity market for fixed, short-range radios as well as LP-WAN is estimated to be 20 billion connected devices by 2025 (Machina Research, May 2015).
RFaxis will be showcasing the company’s new family of high performance, ultra miniature RFeIC™ solutions for IoT at the 2016 Mobile World Congress (MWC) to be held in Barcelona, Spain, on February 22-25, 2016, as well as at the Embedded World 2016 to be held in Nuremberg, Germany, on February 23-25.
