RFaxis and Beken roll out first joint reference design for advanced wireless three-in-one solution

IRVINE, USA: -RFaxis, a fabless semiconductor company focused on innovative, next-generation Radio Frequency (RF) solutions for the wireless connectivity and cellular mobility markets, announced that its second-generation, pure-CMOS based single-chip/single-die, ZigBee RFX2401C RF Front-end Integrated Circuit (RFeICTM), has been released to end-customers for mass deployment and production as part of the Beken Corporation’s reference design for its latest BK2423 2.4GHz wireless transceiver, marking the first milestone along a multi-project collaboration between the two companies.

Headquartered in Pudong, Shanghai, Beken Corporation is a leading fabless integrated circuits (IC) provider to the burgeoning global wireless communications market. Since its inception in 2005, Beken has been consistently delivering highly integrated, high-performance semiconductor products wielding its leading-edge RF-CMOS transceiver and advanced DSP system innovations.

The BK2423 is a new addition to Beken’s BK24xx series 2.4GHz transceiver and SoC family which provide air data rate ranging from 250 kbps to 4 Mbps. BK2423 is pin-compatible to the company’s popular BK2421 GFSK transceiver, which has found numerous applications such as wireless keyboards/mice, wireless audio, wireless game controllers/gamepads, wireless security, home automation, and industrial control.

While the BK2423 transceiver itself provides up to +5 dBm output power, by inserting RFX2401C in-between the BK2423 RF pin and the antenna port with a simple 50-Ohm based PCB layout modification, the combined design delivered up to +20 dBm maximum transmit power, and achieved a significant improvement in receive sensitivity at the same time.

Dr. Pengfei Zhang, CEO of Beken, commented: “Today’s PC users are looking beyond the convenience of using wireless keyboards and mice. New features such as RF controllers for multimedia centers and high-quality wireless stereo audio are gaining popularity and are on solid path to becoming the next mainstream standard. A robust RF link with sufficient transmit power and excellent receive sensitivity is very crucial for users’ satisfaction.

“We are very pleased to work with RFaxis and utilize their cost effective and highly integrated, CMOS RFeICs. As we roll out new advanced products, including our 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz stereo-audio SoCs, we look forward to a continued partnership with RFaxis so that, together, we can deliver the most appealing products to the market in terms of cost and performance competitiveness.”

“We are pleased to see that our collaboration with Beken has started to bear fruits,” said Mike Neshat, chairman and CEO of RFaxis. “Both of our companies are firm believers in CMOS RF, our technology roadmaps are well aligned, and we see excellent synergy to work together on many different platforms. This is a great beginning and we are looking forward to taking several new reference designs into production in the coming weeks and months.”

RFX2401C is a fully integrated, single-chip/single-die RFeIC that incorporates all key RF front end functions necessary for 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, AMR/AMI, wireless sensor network, wireless audio/video and many other applications in the license-free 2.4GHz ISM frequency band. The RFX2401C comes complete with a high-efficiency power amplifier (PA), low noise amplifier (LNA), transmit and receive port switch, antenna switch, impedance matching network, harmonic filters and CMOS control logic, all integrated onto a single silicon die and delivered in an ultra-compact 3x3x0.5mm 16-lead QFN package.

RFX2401C is designed using standard CMOS process and pin-compatible with its BiCMOS predecessor RFX2401. New users of RFX2401C can take advantage of the greatly improved on-chip RF decoupling scheme, which requires only one single decoupling capacitor on a single DC supply voltage pin for the entire chip. The RFX2401C is in volume production and available through RFaxis’ worldwide distributors.