Ember and ZigBee™

Since its inception, Ember’s commitment to open industry standards has shown through its ceaseless involvement and contributions to the standards organizations shaping the low power wireless market. Ember’s technical management team played a leading role in defining the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for low power wireless radios. Ember is a key promoter and member on the Board of the ZigBee Alliance (www.zigbee.org), an association of more about 300 companies working together to drive the networking software standard for such applications. The ZigBee standard will be instrumental in connecting and automating a host of devices that consume significant energy from home lighting, HVAC and appliances as well as other securityand control devices in buildings and homes into a wireless “Internet of things.”

Dr. Bob Metcalfe, Chairman of Ember and inventor of Ethernet, is a well known proponent of global standards.

Ember has committed significant human, infrastructural and financial resources to help accomplish the mission and goals of the ZigBee alliance. Some of the efforts are as under:

• The core of Ember’s engineering team is focused on ZigBee, and during the early stages had a senior engineer almost exclusively working on the ZigBee networking layer, to help ensure that a good standard was delivered.
• Ember management personnel have served in leadership positions for the alliance as well as in working groups within.
• Ember has often hosted or driven interoperability events of the alliance, enabling other vendors in the alliance the use of its large and unmatched test network.
  
• Ember has always made strong efforts to help drive the increasing membership of OEMs and developers around the world.
  

But beyond just helping to set the standards, Ember has played a leadership role in bringing 802.15.4 and ZigBee out of the labs and into the real world. Ember was the first company with IEEE-compliant chips and software in volume production with real customers in real deployments. The company’s chip/software platform has been qualified as the “golden suite” for IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee PRO interoperability, by testing giant NTS, on which all other ZigBee-based wireless semiconductors are judged for interoperability and standard compliance.

Ember offers a proven, reliable and easy-to-use development environment to help OEMs bring ZigBee products to market.

Ember's ZigBee compliant networking stack, EmberZNet PRO™ is universally acknowledged as the best in class - most robust, feature-rich and scalable stack in the industry.

ZigBee is be the leading wireless standard for monitoring and control and Ember will continue to play a vital role in its future.