Paging carriers looking to provide airtime for telemetry and off-the-hip paging applications received a big boost when Motorola Inc. introduced its first-generation ReFLEX chipset solution.
The chipset includes a ReFLEX encoder/decoder equipped with ReFLEX Stack two-way software and a complete transceiver/receiver subsystem. The release marks the first time the company has disclosed its formerly proprietary two-way messaging solution that includes a radio-frequency chipset.
Before Motorola introduced these chipsets, its ReFLEX decoder was available but without an RF transceiver, which Motorola kept proprietary. Those companies wanting to extend two-way paging functionality to devices had to license the ReFLEX protocol and then have an engineering team design the chipset for it, a lengthy and expensive process.
Board-level solutions were available to select carriers in the past, but this announcement allows any developer access to ReFLEX’s two-way messaging technology when creating applications.
“What we’ve done here is have a ReFLEX chip integrated into a main controller that does all the ReFLEX chores,” said Gavin Bourne, Motorola’s FLEX chipset marketing director. He said it decodes the message and passes it in serial data form to host systems, which can read the data as if it were incoming from a modem, regardless of operating system type. With the new chip, application developers can write applications without needing to understand fully the ReFLEX protocol, as the chipset decodes it for them.
“From the point of view of a guy developing equipment, he doesn’t have to have a Ph.d. in ReFLEX to do so,” Bourne said. “The codec is completely self-sufficient.”
News of the release was something paging carriers have long awaited. Carriers operating or building out two-way networks believe their systems will be of great use in monitoring and telemetry applications. While they have concentrated on creating ubiquitous two-way networks, carriers long have looked to Motorola to provide developers the tools necessary to connect their networks to machines and appliances that one day may be carriers’ biggest user group.
There are a host of telemetry and off-the-hip paging applications for which carriers want developers to write programs, but they needed a two-way point from which to start.
“Having a ReFLEX chipset is the first major step in enabling that,” said Doug Ritter, senior vice president of corporate development at Paging Network Inc. “One of the things important for us to achieve our vision of consumer content and customer solutions is the ability to deliver wireless content to a variety of devices. Certainly, (for) a lot of those opportunities … the ability to drop in ReFLEX is extremely important.”
Motorola previously introduced two generations of one-way FLEX chipsets for the same purpose, but it did little to meet carrier needs.
“The one thing the one-way chipset did … was it proved the need for two-way,” Ritter said. Outside of generating some awareness of paging technology among developers, the FLEX chipsets were mere warm-up acts generating excitement to the main show-that being two-way-a fact not lost on Motorola.
“I think it’s fair to say … that when companies approach (carriers) to deploy an application, they usually prefer the application to be two-way ReFLEX. I believe all these non-paging applications will be on ReFLEX,” Bourne said.
The timing of the chipset release was based on the growing proliferation of ReFLEX networks and services, he continued.
There are 15 ReFLEX licensees and 11 service providers offering ReFLEX services, either as facilities-based carriers or resellers. Bourne particularly noted the buildout underway by PageMart Wireless Inc. and PageNet. As such, Motorola felt the time was right to introduce the chipset.
“Now that the network proliferation has moved ahead, we thought it would be better to go to a chipset solution,” Bourne said.
The challenge now, said PageNet’s Ritter, is to educate and raise awareness of ReFLEX paging possibilities among application developers and inspire them to accept two-way technology as a viable addition to their work-so it becomes commonplace. All paging carriers are waiting for that day.
“It is great to see Motorola developing the chipset technology that will both drive the standardization of ReFLEX and enable the computer industry to integrate embedded two-way wireless messaging applications into a variety of devices,” said N. Ross Buckenham, president of PageMart.
The chipset supports ReFLEX 2.6, which includes all the benefits of the recently upgraded FLEX 1.9, such as location-based messaging and the ability to roam between different frequencies, operators and formats, the company said. The exact architecture of the chipset, availability and pricing will be announced at the Embedded Systems Conference next month in San Jose, Calif.
In one-way FLEX chipset news, Hitachi Semiconductor America Inc. announced its subsidiary, Hitachi Ltd., entered a licensing agreement with Motorola Inc. for the FLEX Stack software. Hitachi said it plans to use the one-way paging solution in its SuperH RISC and H8 microprocessors and microcontrollers, allowing embedded and mobile designers to create one-way wireless data and messaging services based on Windows CE operation system support.
