AMIS-53000 RF Tranceiver

Hi

Anyone been into the Amis multi band RF transceiver AMIS-53000 (goes from 400MHz to 990MHz)? I am seareching for reference designs or other peoples opinion/experience with this chip in comparsion to other brands.

AMIS-53000 can be found here.:
http://www.amis.com/wireless/amis_53000.html

Hi

First, I will post this privat post also into the original forum topic for the community, therefor I quote your priv. message first.

blapcb wrote:
My project for AMIS is somewath on ice at the moment but may arise and become active again not to far into the future. However, I have not managed to find any better brands to compete with Amis when it comes to features and ease of use in the level segment I work in. Our last change before project pause was to switch from amis53000 to amis53050, an industrial version of the 53000 chip. 52000 is not an option to us since frequency band is to narrow, only going up to 700MHz.

For 53050 you can find a ref design +more at http://www.amis.com/products/wireless/amis_53050.html, but only for the standalone transmitter (i.e. no basband processor). The ref design for amis + baseband should arrive during august/september i guess this year (beeing 2007) according to what their web page states (it says Q307).

However, the datasheet will give you certain design examples where figure 19 is a Minimum Design implementation with lowest possible external BOM. Youst be sure to pay great attention to the layout in fig 20. its always more important than one should expect.

Also we intended to use the SPI lookalike interface, not i2c. One big drawback for Amis, is that I am a bit unsure how available their technology is at the moment, and I do not have fully insight in its total cost comapred to other brands in the anual usage segment our product will be in. Amis do have a bit work to do to make them self heard, atleast the way I feel it. This is also important when it comes to making a choice of wich technology to use, but on the other hand, the few times I have been in contact with them their responce has been accurate and quite fast compared to others, and this counts quite a bit too.


Best regards
Vidar (Z)

Did you have the chance to compare or use chipcon (now TI) transceivers as well? any opinion on that? compared to Amis?
Mazz

I have been using chipcon on a few earlier jobs and they really helped us out after we had crashlanded a project using Nordic vlsi RF solution. We then switched for CC1020... I think it was..

But, I do remember that one of the problem with chipcon back then, before becoming a part of TI, was that there could have been done changes on the chip asic from batch to batch which could affect the usage and initialization of the chip, and to often they forgot to inform aboute this before we discovered it when testing products. Thus, several times after product release, we had to release sw uppgrades, and the board assembler had to pay extra attention to the CC1020 batch number. Also we found several errors in their datasheet. Hopefully TI helped chipcon get rid of such problems.

Mentioned all this, I have to say that the Chipcon solution did work mostly as expected at first power-up and it is not a bad solution, But, my opinion is that AMIS seems to be youst as easy to use as the TI/Chipcon solutions but by reading the datasheet for both, I think AMIS is better but I am not an RF guru and I have no experience with AMIS in the field. Also, compared to the Chipcon solution we used, the AMIS PCB footprint will be a bit smaller. And as mentioned earlier, support attention does mean a lot, here AMIS is better.

breg
Vidar (Z)

I am familiar with the AMIS-53000/53050 and may be able to answer any specific questions you may have.

Well, for me that would be "what is your overall impression for amis53050"?
i.e. performance, eas of use, etc. and pitfals you eventually found during developement and finaly, was it worth it?

Thanks in advance
best regards'
Vidar (Z)

I found it to be really really easy to use. The only thing that I would say is lacking is the documentation wasn't great.

The performance met or surpasses the competition that I saw. What types of performance specs does your system require?

For a generic RF tranceiver it had a lot of functionality which allows you to offload many utilities from an external micro.

In some types of applications the 53050 can be used as a standalone IC.

Hmm.. thats one of the little things which made me preffere Amis infront of Chipcon. I especially liked the way they went true each segment of the refference design in the datasheet. But then again, i never got that far that I eventually started write the drivers for it so perhaps the register description lack some information...

According to my prefferences, I will most possible be required to add in one amplifyer stage to get the range needed (atleast 500m in open field a warm hummid summer morning) but the choice of antenna+++ will affect this aswell and I never finished the link budget. For the bitrate approximately 2 to 4kbps would do.