Freescale Semiconductor is expanding its Kinetis MCU portfolio with a wireless solution built on the ARM Cortex-M4 processor for smart energy, smart metering and building control applications. Freescale designed the Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU family to address the increased processing and memory requirements associated with future ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 and Internet Protocol specifications. The Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU integrates an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a class-leading MC13242 RF transceiver and a robust feature set to provide a reliable, secure, low-power ZigBee platform.
With the Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU solution, designers can quickly make feature changes without going back to the drawing board. The KW20 wireless MCU provides greater processing power and larger flash and RAM options compared to other devices on the market, helping end applications avoid obsolescence as specifications evolve. Freescale’s KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 RF transceiver provide leading RF performance by reducing power consumption and increasing link budget. The transceiver features antenna diversity, which improves RF reliability, especially for conditions where multipath interference occurs. The KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 transceiver are designed to reduce transmit and receive power, and a low-power run mode optimizes energy use.
The KW20 wireless MCU and MC13242 offer dual personal area network support, enabling a single device to communicate wirelessly on two ZigBee networks. This helps eliminate the need for multiple radios that in the past were necessary to connect different home automation and smart energy networks. Secure flash protects the code and data from unauthorized access or modification, while tamper detect can detect events and asynchronously erase Secure RAM and generate an interrupt so the application firmware can take additional actions, including a system reset. A memory-mapped cryptographic acceleration unit supports a set of specialized operations to improve the throughput of encryption/decryption operations as well as message digest functions.
