AUSTIN, Texas-Motorola Inc. introduced a new chip last week designed to bring paging capability to personal digital assistants and other devices not traditionally used for paging.
The MMC2080 chip can fully support the new G1.9 FLEX specification by combining a FLEX paging decoder and an M-CORE RISC microcontroller on one chip, the first of its kind in the industry, Motorola said. This allows PDA or palmtop vendors to integrate FLEX-based paging capabilities into their devices without the need for add-on cards or modems, required when transmitting over digital networks.
Not just for PDAs, Motorola is touting the chip’s ability to extend paging to devices like watches, alarm systems, remote meters and vending machines, further committing itself to the potentially lucrative thing-to-thing or “off-the-hip” paging application market.
Motorola plans to offer a complete set of hardware tools to support the MMC2080, including a computer memory board with FLASH and RAM memory, voltage level translators, serial ports and logic analyzer connectors. The CMB also will feature a connector to Motorola’s FLEX Development Kit for testing messaging applications.
Samples of the MMC2080 are expected by the end of the year with production volumes available in 1999 for $9.88 in volumes of 10,000 units. The CMB will be available in December for $625 and the evaluation board for $375.
