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	MAC layer development

About The Customer

The customer creates intelligent connectivity software for wireless voice, data and video communications. The solutions are created to be ZigBee-compliant and to operate in the unlicensed bands worldwide. They are designed to run on any microprocessor platform.

The Challenge

The challenge was to build a MAC layer, which is portable across different hardware micro controllers and operating systems. Design and coding had to utilize minimum hardware resources, which are guaranteed to be available across other hardware platforms. Code portability was a must. The code developed had to be lean, fast, highly reliable and using minimum amount of DATA / RAM size. In addition, the software had to have save battery power.

The Solution

Developed very small footprint real time kernel to host MAC layer software as RTOS task. Timeouts and events based MAC layer state machine were implemented on RTOS. This design also helped in easy integration of other layers above the MAC Layer. The kernel occupied 600 bytes footprint.

The Mac Layer was built over IEEE 802.5.14 compliant PHY Layer. All the Hardware related modules and routines were abstracted in HAL layer for easy portability and testing. To ensure reliability, watchdog timer functions were used and to reduce power consumption, MSP430 power savings mode was used. Few customizable features were moved to "low cost EEPROM" on board chip, which helped "on field" programmability.

The Benefits


	Low cost solution when compared to competitors who used very expensive code generator SDL tools.
	Quickest time to market. Parallel development of MAC and PHY layers.
	Mindteck’s offshore development center in Bangalore provided high quality talent at lower costs, maximizing value for the customer.
	Optimum code size and memory consumption for the MAC layer as proposed by the customer.
	Cost advantages, as the solution was not exclusive to single micro processor/controller vendor.
	Customizable features both at the device build time and run time.
	Highly reliable architecture.

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