As consumer demand for integrated home entertainment devices and invisible peripherals increases, RF (radio frequency)-based device manufacturers are designing solutions that offer superior performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness to meet this demand. In response to these technological needs, Freescale Semiconductor, a leading supplier of IEEE® 802.15.4 chipsets, today announced the MC1323x system-on-chip family for ZigBee RF4CE consumer electronics.

Freescale's MC1323x product family provides a comprehensive, integrated solution with exceptional processing power and minimal power consumption. The MC1323x family features an 8-bit HCS08 microcontroller specifically selected and optimized for today's consumer electronics, a fully compatible IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver, flash memory, RAM, and high-performance peripherals. Through this new product family, consumers can directly support and utilize existing infrared (IR) functions as well as RF control and monitoring. The family initially consists of three devices based on memory sizes of up to 128K flash and 8K RAM, and the addition of USB 2.0 peripherals. With its independently combined monitoring and control capabilities, the MC1323x family is also suitable for general market applications such as remote controls, TVs, set-top boxes, portable blood pressure monitors, scales, and home appliances.

Reza Kazerounian, Vice President and General Manager of Freescale Microcontroller Solutions Group, stated, “We developed the MC1323x as a solution that provides high performance and industry-leading integration at a cost-effective price point by working directly with customer manufacturers.” “As wireless applications continue to grow rapidly in fields such as home entertainment control, health and medical monitoring, and consumer electronics, demand for the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee family has been found to be very high,” he said.

Bas Driesen, Chairman of the RF4CE Steering Committee, stated, “The market share of ZigBee RF4CE in the consumer electronics industry is increasing due to consumer trends seeking a clean living room by hiding the complex cables of set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and audio receivers, as well as the rise of wall-mounted TVs. Freescale has played a central role in creating and driving RF4CE adoption and is further strengthening the RF4CE market with the development of the MC1323x product family.”

Freescale's ZigBee RF4CE system-on-chip product portfolio is based on IEEE 802.15.4 technology, which is known to provide excellent performance and efficiency in real-time remote monitoring and control at an economical cost.
ZigBee RF4CE technology provides radio frequency communication, enhances speed, reliability, and interference avoidance, and enables exceptional flexibility to operate devices over longer distances. This technology resolves the straight-line range and line-of-sight barriers of today's infrared (IR) applications. Utilizing bidirectional communication, ZigBee RF4CE opens the door to entirely new performance capabilities and consumer environments. The ZigBee RF4CE standard is designed for a wide range of consumer electronics, including home entertainment and input devices.

Freescale also provides software, reference designs, and development kits for various hardware platforms for evaluating the MC1323x system-on-chip, allowing developers to select the hardware and software platform best suited to their needs.

Supply situation
MC13233C is currently a customer sample