1.1 Introduction

The ATA8510/15 is a highly integrated, low-power UHF ASK/FSK RF transceiver with an integrated AVR microcontroller.

The ATA8510/15 is partitioned into three sections: an RF front end, a digital baseband and the low-power 8-bit AVR microcontroller. The product is designed for the 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. By combining outstanding RF performance with highly sophisticated baseband signal processing, robust wireless communication can be easily achieved. The receive path uses a low-IF architecture with an integrated double quadrature receiver and digitized IF processing. This results in high image rejection and excellent blocking performance. The transmit path uses a closed loop fractional-N modulator with Gauss shaping and pre-emphasis functionality for high data rates. In addition, highly flexible and configurable baseband signal processing allows the transceiver to operate in several scanning, wake-up and automatic self-polling scenarios. For example, during polling, the IC can scan for specific message content (IDs) and save valid telegram data in the 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, etc.

The ATA8510/15 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 SPI commands or application software. The application software is located in the Flash for the ATA8510. Highly configurable and autonomous scanning capability enables flexible polling scenarios with up to 15 channels. The configuration of the transceiver is stored in a 1024-byte EEPROM. The SPI interface enables external control and device reconfiguration.

In the ATA8510, the internal microcontroller with the 20-Kbyte user Flash can be used to add custom extensions to the firmware. The ATA8515 embeds only the firmware ROM without the user memory.

The debugWIRE and ISP interface are available for programming purposes.