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Ember Announces Industry's First Single Source ZigBee Wireless Network Platform (20/12/2004)

Ember's ZigBee platform provides complete stack free of charge; offers fast and proven single-source solution for OEMs seeking rapid entry into burgeoning ZigBee market

On the heels of today's official ratification of the ZigBee(TM) Specification, Ember Corporation today announced a new version of its wireless networking platform that is designed to be fully ZigBee compliant, once official testing begins in the coming weeks. Ember's ZigBee software together with its EM2420 chip will be the industry's first single source platform to feature an 802.15.4-compliant radio and a ZigBee protocol stack in a powerful development environment.

Ember's ZigBee platform supports pre-defined stack profiles like Home Controls for home automation applications, as well as a customer configurable stack profile. Ember's support for user configurable stack profiles enables customers to create solutions, optimized to their specific applications. In addition, Ember will continue to provide enhancements including its reliable transport layer, for which Ember customers have been designing products for several years.

Ember also announced that it will bundle into its full suite of development tools the full ZigBee stack free of charge to OEM customers, thus reducing the ZigBee licensing costs and hassles imposed by competitors' third-party ZigBee offerings.

"Ember's ZigBee platform will enable OEMs adopting ZigBee to get their products to market much faster," said Venkat Bahl, Ember's vice president of marketing. "Ember has harnessed its years of extensive wireless networking experience from real-world implementations, into building this complete, easy-to-use platform. Ember's ZigBee solution gives OEMs a fully integrated, single source solution that shields them from everything except what they do best: building applications."

Ember's lead in the ZigBee race stems from its long involvement and contributions in helping to forge the standard. Ember is a promoter of the ZigBee Alliance, with Ember executives serving in strategic roles such as the organization's vice chairman as well as technical editor for the ZigBee networking specification. Moreover, Ember's wireless semiconductor system was chosen as the National Technical Systems' (NTS) "Golden Suite" standard by which all other IEEE 802.15.4 products are tested for compliance and interoperability.

According to Harbor Research analyst Glen Allmendinger, networks of ZigBee-based smart devices will transform public and private life more than any computing development since the PC. "ZigBee is a major advance over earlier approaches to wireless device networking, and will be a crucial enabler throughout this decade, not only in the home, but in many other markets as well," he said.

Ember's ZigBee platform is designed to be a complete, fast-to-market solution for OEMs building products for home and building control, automation, security, consumer electronics, medical monitoring and toys. These applications require a technology that offers long battery life, reliability, automatic or semiautomatic installation, the ability to easily add or remove network nodes, and low system cost. Ember's ZigBee solution supports these OEM requirements with wireless mesh monitoring and management networks that automatically configure and heal themselves and work for years on very little power.

www.ember.com