Easy to implement home control on a single chip

A single chip and a compact module, that add flexible and advanced remote control and monitoring features to a home, office or light industrial device, is now available from Sequoia.

A single chip and a compact module, that add flexible and advanced remote control and monitoring features to a home, office or light industrial device, is now available from Sequoia.

Z-Wave from Sequoia is a mesh wireless RF-based communications technology designed for residential and light commercial control and status reading applications such as meter reading, lighting and appliance control, HVAC, access control, and intruder detection.

Each node includes repeater functionality, and the basic 30m range of the protocol can be extended to a maximum recommended distance between source and destination of 120m.

By contrast to other well-known wireless networking standards, it is optimised for a very fast turn-on, exceptionally low power consumption and low datarates.

With very short transmit times and efficient design, Z-Wave nodes can easily be powered from a battery, with a long lifetime.

For applications like home lighting control, user expectation is for action within 250ms, and the Z-Wave protocol has been configured to achieve this.

It uses the fact that its target applications require the transmission of tiny amounts of data, and uses a datarate of just 9.6Kbit/s.

Z-Wave is implemented as a mixed signal chip, the ZW0103, integrating an RF transceiver, the Z-Wave protocol storage and handling, and capacity for application storage and handling.

It is supported by manufacturing blueprints of the PCB circuitry required - including antenna circuitry and filters.

Ready-made modules, with or without the antenna, are also available.

The ZW0102 is the core of Z-Wave, and features an exceptionally low standby current of just 0.1uA.

This rises to 25mA on transmission, but as the protocol has been designed to keep transmit and receive time to an absolute minimum it is feasible to run a node from a battery with a very long life.

The device includes an 8bit CPU core, which has capacity to handle an application as well as the wireless communication protocol.

Up to 20Kbit of available Flash memory gives the OEM the opportunity to download and run just about any control application directly on the Z-Wave single chip.

This eliminates the need for an additional micro controller and external Flash memory for application code storage.

To simplify the process of implementing Z-Wave into a system Sequoia is offering module designs as blueprints for fully RF qualified communication PCBs that enable embedded intelligence and wireless communication capabilities in virtually any controllable device.

Manufactured modules, based on these designs, are also available from Sequoia.

The modules are based on the ZW0102 single chip, and include all the external components surrounding the single chip, such as crystals, filters, and balancing components, which are necessary for reliable RF communication.

In addition, the functionality of the entire OEM product can be controlled from the Z-Wave module through a number of digital and analogue I/Os available on the ZW0102 single chip.

This not only secures a lower cost implementation, but also enables simple upgrading of existing product designs.

The modules have been tested to be in compliance with FCC Part 15 and R and TTE 1999/5/EC.

Sequoia is also offering a Z-Wave developer's kit that contains all the software and detailed documentation necessary to design and write OEM application software on top of the Z-Wave protocol API, as well as to test and debug the final Z-Wave product.

In addition, the Z-Wave developer's kit contains several Z-Wave modules, which are fully RF qualified communication PCBs, incorporating all the components necessary to enable any device to communicate wirelessly.

Back to top