Freescale Semiconductor is expanding its portfolio with the industry’s first wireless solution built on the ARM Cortex-M4 processor for smart energy, smart metering and building control applications with a new Kinetis microcontroller. Freescale’s new generation of Kinetis wireless solutions brings  performance and security together in a scalable ZigBee platform, allowing designers to optimize solutions to fit their specific applications.

Freescale designed the Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU family to address the increased processing and memory requirements associated with future ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 and Internet specifications. The Kinetis KW20 wireless MCU integrates an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a class-leading MC13242 RF transceiver and a robust feature set to provide a reliable, secure, low-power ZigBee platform. Designers can select the KW20 MCU single-chip solution or choose to combine the RF transceiver with a corresponding Kinetis MCU, giving them more flexibility to tailor the device to their specific application needs.

Freescale has integrated advanced security features usually found in higher-end processors to address the need for more advanced encryption methods, key generation, secure memory and tamper detect. Secure flash protects the code and data from unauthorized access or modification, while tamper detect feature can detect events and asynchronously erase Secure RAM and generate an interrupt so the application firmware can take additional actions, including a system reset. A memory-mapped cryptographic acceleration unit supports a set of specialized operations to improve the throughput of encryption/decryption operations as well as message digest functions.

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