On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Felix Varghese <felixv1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> cc2530, mc13224 and stm32w are all in common use. They don't cost that >> much more than the non-SOC chips. > > True. But the fact is that there are plenty of non-SOC chips in the > market too and a good implementation (good == widely adopted and used) > should cater to both. In this regard, I guess the Soft/Hard MAC > division makes a lot of sense. > >> Doing a full MAC on native Linux with radio-only chips is probably >> going to require the real-time kernel in order to meet timing >> restrictions. You also have to allow for the different speed links >> into the chips - serial, SPI, USB, etc. It is much easier to move the >> hard real-time code onto a SOC. 95% of the code will still run on >> Linux, you just off-load the problem bits into the SOC. > > Most new transceivers already have hardware support to handle > time-critical stuff (ACK, CSMA and retries, even address filtering). > I agree that an SOC with the whole MAC embedded in it would be the > perfect option, but cheaper radio solutions would always remain
Are they really cheaper? It is hard to beat the pricing of the low end (small flash) CC2530 and STM32W SOC chips. > attractive to hardware designers, however small the cost difference > may be. I guess a non-beacon enabled MAC should run pretty well on the Beaconed mode is where most of the trouble lies. Unless you have huge volumes it doesn't make sense to trade off a dime in chip cost and pick up a $200K+ software problem. > normal kernel, provided we use transceivers with hardware > acceleration. > > Regards, > Felix. -- Jon Smirl jonsm...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Linux-zigbee-devel mailing list Linux-zigbee-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-zigbee-devel
