> 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
attractive to hardware designers, however small the cost difference
may be. I guess a non-beacon enabled MAC should run pretty well on the
normal kernel, provided we use transceivers with hardware
acceleration.

Regards,
Felix.

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