Motorola Inc.’s ReFLEX chipset and software solution first announced a month ago is available for purchase. The company also released more details about the product.
The chipset includes a ReFLEX encoder/decoder equipped with ReFLEX Stack two-way software and a complete transceiver/receiver subsystem. This marks the first time Motorola has released formerly proprietary two-way messaging solutions that include a radio-frequency chipset.
Last week, Motorola announced it licensed the platform and provided additional training to Diablo Research Co. L.L.C., allowing the RF design consultants to provide applications engineering and design services to people who want to develop integrated wireless applications. This way, value-added resellers and original equipment manufacturers unfamiliar with ReFLEX technology can go to Diablo for the ReFLEX chipset and the support needed to integrate the chipset’s functions into whatever product they wish. Motorola only needs to deal with Diablo.
The applications expected to drive the chipset into new areas include telemetry and what it called air-mail-two-way paging.
The chipset itself consists of two subsystems, a single chip ReFLEX codec that integrates the hardware and software resources-such as the ReFLEX Stack driver software-and a complete RF chipset implementing the transceiver/receiver subsystem.
Motorola also released the names of partners that helped create the chipset. The ReFLEX codec was manufactured by Texas Instruments Inc. The transceiver subsystem included integrated components provided by TriQuint Semiconductor, Analog Devices Inc. and Maxim Integrated Products, as well as TI.
ADI is the first of these manufacturers to disclose the exact pricing and availability of its portion of the solution, which specifically is a band-pass, sigma-delta intermediate frequency analog-to-digital converter. Called the AD6140, the converter costs $2.95 apiece in quantities of 10,000 units.
Omid Tahernia, director of Motorola’s FLEX Enabling Operations division, said more advances will be made to the chipset over time. “Later next year, we will have a complete modem board embedded into a variety of devices by an application development board.”
