News and New Products

Alliance ratifies ZigBee standard

By Jeff Berman, News Editor -- EDN, 12/14/2004

The ZigBee Alliance today officially ratified the specification for its namesake technology, which is designed for low-cost, low-power wireless sensor networks in remote-monitoring, home-control, and building-network applications.

ZigBee Alliance chairman Bob Heile told EDN that this endorsement means the Alliance "can take what member companies have begun to implement and get test houses and 'Zig tests' running to move this into a full-blown market launch, because the specification-development phase is now completed." The development of the spec took a little more than two years.

Having a standard in place is important, Heile said, because it helps control network expenses and increases the availability of sensor and control offerings from multiple vendors, many of whom are Alliance members.

"This is a huge step forward in wireless networking for electrical engineers," said Ryan Kelley, global product manager for Zigbee at Freescale Semiconductor. "A lot of work has gone into ZigBee, and this brings wireless connectivity into a simple networking protocol that engineers can go into very quickly. And Zigbee offers lots of innovations and leaps forward compared to other wireless protocols which have been available up to now."

For example, Zigbee offers a true mesh of up to 65,000 nodes in a network, making it possible to cover an entire building or house using the same networking protocol, Kelley said.

The next step for the ZigBee Alliance is a conformance-testing program. The program, which has already been through three dry runs, is designed to ensure test houses running ZigBee-based applications are up and running and to execute interoperability testing, Heile said. The program will run for one year.

"It is important for us to go through a test house and interoperability testing with other manufacturers," Heile said. "We know we are going to discover issues with test specs, and we need to be able to fix them and make sure things reaching the market are interoperable."

Vendors will have to achieve a "steady consistency" in order to receive ZigBee logo certifications, Heile said. He expects ZigBee-compliant consumer products to be released early next year.