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Smallest tranciever IC

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oddjob

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Hi All,

I am working on a project which requires a very small footprint and a radio transceiver. The type of radio source is fairly flexible, bluetooth, zigbee, 433MHz are all possibilities. Only a very small bandwidth is required <1kbps.

Does anyone know of a suitable device? What is the smallest tranciever?

Cheers
 
as small as possible. I know you can get micros such as the Attiny10 that are 4mm x 4mm. This is the sort of size range.
 
What are you going to power it with? Little watch batteries have high internal resistance and generally don't fare well with mA current draw.
 
It will only be powered up for milli seconds at a time so a small electrolytic should provide enough current with a watch battery. When I have found which device I am using I will do the relevent calculations to determine if the power can be supplied.
 
You can't just power the module up for miliseconds at a time, it will take longer than that to negotiate the bluetooth link. The power draw of the bluetooth modules is between 15 and 20ma. A coin cell will be just barely within the allowable voltage range and only when it's at full capacity so you'll have an incredibly low useful life, one the battery is bellow 80% capacity the voltage won't be high enough to operate the module anymore. That could be only a few hundred cycles. A proper battery would actually probably be smaller than adding an additional cap. The Lithium batteries from those tiny RC helicopters fit the bill nicely, and they're extremely small, they have more than enough power to last, they're right around the same size as the module you're using and only a few mm's thick.

Anything smaller and you're compromising size for DRAMATIC decreases in performance. What's the rational for making the device so small?
 
Another option from the same company is the ANT transceivers: e.g. Transceiver nRF24AP1 with Trace Antenna - SparkFun Electronics, that's the AP1 model.. the AP2 version uses 3uA + 21uA.s/message/direction (8 byte payload), and can do burst-mode comms @20kbps. These are generally used in wireless cycle computers, heartrate monitors, etc. They are touted as being micropower transceivers.
 
The trace antenna rather than the chip antenna makes it 5 times the size though, I guess you could cut off the PCB trace carefully and solder on a chip antenna.
 
This board is still somewhat too large. I have found a single IC from farnell that seems much smaller 4mm x 4mm, this still requires some passives and a crystal but the size restriction is width and depth rather than length. TEXAS INSTRUMENTS|CC1101RTK|TRANSCEIVER, SUB 1GHZ, LO POWER | Farnell United Kingdom

The antenna is not a problem at all.

As for power, I need this device to be as small as it can. A watch battery has around 60mAh capacity, I realise that it has a high internal resistance but as the duty cycle is so low on this device i think this is not an issue provided a small electrolytic is used. It literately needs to receive and transmit a byte or two every fifteen seconds or every second depending on the mode.

I cannot stress the requirement of this device being thin enough. I'm sorry I am not being clear about what I'm intending and I hope this is ok with people.

Thanks for your help so far.
 
The size of the IC isn't your problem, the NRF IC's are the same size as the one you just posted, you still have other components that have to be used so the PCB it's mounted to though, You're probably not going to want to use standard PCB material it'll be too thick, so you'll have to find thin copper clad PCB, I just actually picked some up at electronics goldmine but it was a clearance item so you may have trouble finding it.

Are you capable of dealing with making your own custom PCB this small? It would really have helped with suggestion devices if you would actually TELL us what you're trying to do, you're making it impossible to help because you're failing to specify the dimension it HAS to be. 'as thin as possible' isn't a number. 'small' is not a value you can engineer for. What exact physical space must the device fit into?
 
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