AMICCOM is a dedicated RFIC design house located in Taiwan, In July, 2011, we launch the 4th generation high performance sub 1GHz TRX called A7108. A7108 is suitable for AMR (Auto-Metering-Reading) in Smart Grid. It supports not only 470~510 MHz of China AMR but also 868.3MHz and 868.95Mhz of M-Bus in Europe. In addition, A7108 can be used in sub 1GHz license-free ISM band application (300MHz~ 950 MHz), like 315MHz in Japan, 433MHz in Europe and Asia Pacific, as well as 915MHz in USA and Taiwan. A7108 can be accessed by any general purpose MCU via SPI interface for the internal TX/RX 64 bytes FIFO as well as RF control modes. It supports 2K~250Kbps data rate and FSK or GFSK modulation.

The core advantage of A7108 is excellent RF performance and link budget. In 470MHz ~ 510MHz operation, the embedded PA can reach 20dBm output power and RX sensitivity is down to (-114dBm @ 10Kbps). To go with 10Kbps by MD7180-A50 (our ref. design) for field test, the LOS (Light-of-Sight) distance is over 1300 meters in open space with monopole antenna (1.6mm wire and 1/4 wave length). Even in the street test, the LOS distance can approach 1000 meters. If down the data rate from 10Kbps to 2Kbps, the test result is even up to 1600 meters in open space.

Additional features include the build-in RSSI for clear channel assistance, auto-calibration for easy-to-use, AFC to compensate Xtal tolerance. For packet handling, A7108 supports both direct mode and FIFO mode. In FIFO mode, A7108 supports FEC, CRC and Manchester coding.

About power management, A7108 supports Deep sleep mode, Sleep, Idle mode and WOR (Wake On RX), which supports periodically Sleep to RX mode to listen incoming packets without MCU interaction to extend battery lifetime. Deep Sleep mode switches off all circuitry except SPI (wake-up purpose) in only 200nA consumption. Overall, A7108 is very easy-to-use to simplify system development and cost.

A7108 is the best choice of application such as AMR (Metering Reading), two-way long distance RKE, industry controller and Home Automation. The reference design includes High (Low) pass filter and match networking to meet FCC part 15.247 and ETSI EN300-220 regulation under EIRP= 14 dBm.

A7108 is in 4 mm x 4 mm QFN-20 package. AMICCOM and our authorized distributors are welcome you to request IC samples and evaluation modules. For production service, AMICCOM can offer users a special in-house test fixture called TF7108. For more details, please contact us, sales@amiccom.com.tw.