Raising the standard for ultra-low-power near field communication (NFC) devices, Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announced the industry's lowest power contactless short-range communication transceiver. Ideal for infrastructure devices, the new TRF7970A extends battery life up to two times longer than competitive products, as it provides eight selectable power modes ranging from < 1 uA in power-down mode to 120 mA in full-power mode.
The transceiver comes with easy-to-configure software to help developers get started quickly. Royalty-free stacks are compatible across a broad range of ultra-low-power MSP microcontrollers. Additionally, developers are able to directly access all control registers, allowing for easy fine-tuning of various parameters for the highest performance in every application.
The new TRF7970A builds on TI's solid platform of RFID products by supporting peer-to-peer communication and card emulation in addition to reader/writer capability while maintaining pin-for-pin compatibility with the TRF7960. Peer-to-peer communication continues to increase in popularity in applications including medical equipment, secure pairing and payments. This allows users to more easily take advantage of continuously evolving features and apps. For example, NFC devices can configure Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® technology sessions between devices without consumer interaction, share and interact with feature- and content- rich data, such as coupons at point of sale, and allow consumer devices to easily exchange files and contacts.
