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New Texas Instruments FLEX Decoders Provide Roaming, Numeric-Only Options to Wireless Paging/Messaging OEMs

DALLAS (June 16, 1997) -- Two new decoding devices supporting the FLEX™ messaging protocol were announced by Texas Instruments (TI) today as extensions of the company's DSP solutions product portfolio in the paging and messaging market. These decoders are the newest members of TI's TMS320FLEX family of devices, offering greater design versatility to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of pagers and other wireless messaging equipments.

The new devices, designated the TLV5593 Alphanumeric FLEX Decoder with Roaming and the TLV5594 Numeric FLEX Decoder, are enhancements of TI's TLV5591 Alphanumeric FLEX Decoder, and are targeted at the needs of specific market segments. Like the TLV5591, the TLV5593 and TLV5594 perform digital signal processing functions in order to decode FLEX messaging protocol transmissions.

The TLV5593 adds to the TLV5591 feature set the capability of roaming, as defined by the Motorola FLEX protocol specification. With roaming, service providers can build multiple-frequency paging/messaging systems that cover a very wide geography or are capable of supporting very dense populations of users by incorporating multiple frequencies in a single urban location. The TLV5593 will support Korea's recently announced FLEX paging system, the world's first system with FLEX roaming.

The TLV5594, on the other hand, focuses on the low data requirements of strictly numeric paging. The TLV5594 enables OEMs to reduce the cost of numeric pagers while retaining FLEX protocol benefits such as extended battery life, fast signaling speed and high reliability.

A Range of Options for Optimizing FLEX Designs

"TI's TLV559x FLEX decoders offer OEMs important options ranging from low-end numeric capability to high-end alphanumeric capability with roaming, which extend the capabilities of their messaging/paging systems," said Kevin Thomazios, Strategic Marketing Manager for the TI Wireless Communications Business Unit. "FLEX systems offer paging service providers the opportunity to introduce new messaging services to their customers. TI is firmly committed to supplying DSP solutions for FLEX systems because we recognize the importance of the FLEX protocol to the future of the paging/messaging industry."

Each of the TLV559x decoders is designed to function as half of a glueless chip set along with the TLV5590 Analog-to-Digital (A/D) converter, a device that converts the analog signal from the equipment receiver into a digital signal to be handled by the decoder. Since the chip sets interface with most popular off-the-shelf receivers and microcontrollers, OEMs can develop FLEX-compliant products quickly and easily from existing designs with minimal hardware changes. The TLV559x decoders are designed for ease of hardware and software upgrade, simplifying OEM development of equipments with different features based on similar hardware designs.

A complement to the decoders is FLEXstack™ software, designed to facilitate application development. Running on the system controller, FLEXstack handles interchip communications and interprets host commands for the decoder. A soon-to-be-released version of FLEXstack is the first to support roaming. FLEXstack modules that support the capabilities of TLV559x decoders are available on Motorola's World-Wide Web site at http://www.mot.com/FLEXstack.

IC Support for the Messaging Protocol of the Future

The FLEX messaging protocol was developed by the Motorola Paging Products Group in order to improve the performance and reliability of message transmissions, lower power consumption for longer battery life in paging products, and enable paging service providers to offer a new range of messaging services. FLEX has been licensed by service providers around the world and has become the de facto messaging protocol of the future. TI was among the first IC vendors to offer IC products supporting the FLEX protocol, and with its new TLV559x decoders the company continues its leadership in offering innovative DSP solutions for FLEX to paging/messaging OEMs.

The TLV5593 and TLV5594 decoders are available now from Texas Instruments. Each device is packaged in a 32-pin thin quad flatpack (TQFP). Suggested retail pricing for the TLV5593VF is $8.25 each in quantities of 100,000. Suggested retail pricing for the TLV5594VF is $4.97 each in quantities of 100,000.

Purchase of any of the TMS320FLEX chip sets satisfies all FLEX protocol licensing requirements for OEMs. No separate licensing agreement with Motorola is necessary.

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