Articles and whitepapers

Technology: ZigBee RF4CE - A Low-Power Interactive Control Technology (5/7/2010)

By Cees Links, GreenPeak Technologies

Are you tired of your old IR (infrared) remote control? Are you sick of having to point it at your TV set or set top box and try to get it to change volume levels, tune in a new channel or set up your PVR to record a show? Well that is all about to change as a new generation of remote controls, powered by RF and using a new technology called ZigBee RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics), begins to hit the market this year.

Mock up of a ZigBee RF4CE remote controller.

RF has many advantages over IR. RF transmits through walls and doors, whereas with IR you have to be within a few feet and aim the remote at the device you want to control. This means you can hide your set top box away in your cabinet or set up your recording options from anywhere in the home. RF is interactive. Instead of carefully studying the TV set screen to see which shows you are programming into the PVR, you can see the options on your remote control's screen.

Interactivity

ZigBee RF4CE's interactivity can also support shopping, voting and other fun ways to interact with your entertainment system. A very cool feature is 'Find Me'. Press a button on your TV set or set top box and your lost remote control starts beeping or playing a song. RF-based remotes can also be used to monitor and control a wide range of other home systems, including HVAC, security, health monitoring, energy consumption, etc.

Low power consumption

RF4CE also supports ultra low power. For example, remotes using GreenPeak Technology's GP500C RF4CE chip only require one tenth as much power as regular remotes. This means a single battery will last ten times as long. Instead of changing a battery once a year or more often, the battery will last for over ten years, or longer than the life of the product. As 600 million remote controls are sold every year, you can imagine how many fewer batteries, filled with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, have to be manufactured and then disposed of.

The GreenPeak Technology GP500C RF4CE communications controller chip only requires one tenth of the power compared with other controller chips.

Finally, these new RF chips are so affordable that a remote control maker can build RF remotes for about the same cost of materials as an IR remote.

Background

ZigBee RF4CE was originally developed by four of the world's largest consumer electronics manufacturers, namely Panasonic, Phillips, Samsung and Sony. In 2009, the RF4CE standard was adopted by the ZigBee organisation and was renamed ZigBee RF4CE.

ZigBee RF4CE is based on the 802.15.4 standard and operates in the 2.4GHz radio spectrum (similar to 802.11 and Bluetooth). With a data rate of 250kb/s and a range of 30-50m (100-150 feet), ZigBee RF4CE is ideally suited for a wide range of home applications that do not require a lot of data to continuously go back and forth.

Even though ZigBee was originally conceived as a wireless sense and control technology for industrial applications, the ZigBee Alliance has recognised the opportunity to expand into consumer electronics by including RF4CE.

Green technologies

The ZigBee Alliance is also working on a few other related wireless sensor applications for the home such as ZigBee Smart Energy and ZigBee Green Power. Smart Energy is a ZigBee protocol for home energy management, monitoring and control solutions, while ZigBee Green Power is an energy scavenging solution that enables the development of light switches and other low data rate devices that do not require any batteries at all. A ZigBee Green Power switch transmission is generated by the power created by the movement of the switch itself. A tiny coil converts the dynamic energy into enough power to carry the transmission pulse from the switch to a receiver in a lamp.

ZigBee RF4CE provides a low power alternative to be used in solutions that would normally require battery power. Using a radically new controller-centric chip architecture, the GP500, GreenPeak's RF4CE communications controller chip requires much less power than most of the other 802.15.4 communication solutions.

By using radically new controller-centric chip architecture, a ZigBee RF4CE communications controller chip requires much less power.

During its active mode, it only consumes 150 microjoules per packet transmitted, compared with 500 microjoules per packet as with most other radio chips. During sleep mode, less than 100 nanoamps is required to keep the radio alive compared to 1 microamp typically consumed. Because the radios in these kinds of applications sleep most of the time, this can provide an impressive real-world energy saving of almost ten times.

By using ultra low power ZigBee RF4CE in our homes for a variety of sensing, monitoring and control applications, not only will we be able to make our homes a lot smarter, but we will be able to greatly reduce energy consumption and help clean up our planet by reducing our reliance on batteries.

Applications

The first ZigBee RF4CE remote controls are shipping this year in high-end TV sets and set top boxes. However, within a short time, we expect to see the remote control transformed into a home dashboard of sorts - a mobile controller for the home that enables the user to monitor a variety of systems and control them, no matter where in the house they are.

RF4CE remote controls and set top boxes can be used to monitor and control a wide range of home applications including HVAC, entertainment, windows and curtains, security, etc.

The future

A typical architecture would be the remote control, or controls, connecting to a central box via RF4CE, that in turn would connect to a variety of other devices including TV sets, home entertainment servers, the home's security system, environmental controls, etc. RF4CE could also connect the set top box to a variety of sensors for temperature, motion, security, health monitoring, etc, that in turn, would relay the information to the remote control. The set top box could also be connected to the Internet so that the user could remotely monitor and control these various systems from anywhere in the world.

Cees Links is the CEO and Founder of GreenPeak Technologies, a fabless semiconductor company and a leader in ultra-low-power wireless and battery-free communication technology for consumer electronics and wireless sense and control applications.

www.greenpeak.com
www.zigbee.org