Introduction

The ATA8210/15 is a highly integrated, low-power Ultra High-frequency (UHF) Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK)/Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) Radio Frequency (RF) receiver with an integrated AVR microcontroller. The package is pin-to-pin compatible with the Microchip transceiver family ATA8510/15.

The ATA8210/15 is divided into three sections:
  • RF front-end
  • Digital baseband
  • Low-power 8-bit AVR microcontroller
The product is designed for the Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency bands in the ranges of 310-318 MHz, 418-477 MHz and 836-956 MHz. The external part count is kept to a minimum due to the very high level of integration in this device. The user can achieve robust wireless communication by combining outstanding RF performance with highly sophisticated baseband signal processing. The receive path uses a low-IF architecture with an integrated double quadrature receiver and digitized Intermediate Frequency (IF) processing. This results in high image rejection and excellent blocking performance. In addition, highly flexible and configurable baseband signal processing allows the receiver to operate in several scanning, wake-up and automatic self-polling scenarios. For example, during polling, the Integrated Circuit (IC) can scan for specific message content (IDs) and save valid telegram data in the First In First Out (FIFO) buffer for later retrieval. The device integrates two receive paths that enable a parallel search for two telegrams with different modulations, data rates, wake-up conditions and more.

The ATA8210/15 implements a flexible service configuration concept and supports up to 15 channels. The channels are grouped into five service configurations with three channels each. Three service configurations are located in the EEPROM. Two service configurations are located in the SRAM to allow on-the-fly modifications during IDLEMode via Serial Programming Interface (SPI) commands or application software. The application software is located in the Flash for the ATA8210. Highly configurable and autonomous scanning capability enables flexible polling scenarios with up to 15 channels. The configuration of the receiver is stored in a 1024-byte EEPROM. The SPI interface enables external control and device reconfiguration.

Table . Program Memory Comparison of the ATA8210/15 Devices

Device

Firmware ROM

User Flash

User ROM

ATA8210

24 Kbytes

20 Kbytes

—

ATA8215

24 Kbytes

—

—

The ATA8210 provides the ability to use the internal microcontroller with the 20-Kbyte user Flash for adding custom extensions to the firmware. The ATA8215 embeds only the firmware ROM without the user memory. The debugWIRE and ISP interface are available for programming purposes.

Compatibility to the ATA8510/15

The ATA8210/15 is pin-to-pin compatible with the ATA8510/15 transceivers. The RX performance of the receivers matches that of the transceivers.