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 than 200 companies working together to drive the networking software standard for such applications. Ember believes that the ZigBee standard will be instrumental in connecting everything from home lighting and appliances to medical devices and industrial machinery 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 interoperability events of the alliance, enabling other vendors in the alliance the use of its large and unmatched test network.
• Ember has been, and continues to be, a strong supporter and sponsor of ZigBee member meetings and open houses, ZigBee’s premier public event held around the world.
• Ember has ensured that it provides ZigBee a platform,in all its major marketing initiatives, across the world.
  
• Many of the new ZigBee members, who have come on board in the recent past are Ember customers or partners.
  

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 platform has been qualified as the “golden suite” for IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee 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. The company has also developed a network transport layer on top of ZigBee platform to free OEMs from having to worry about the standard’s networking complexities, and instead focus solely on their application.

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

Ember believes that ZigBee will be the leading standard and continue to play a vital role in the mass adoption of this technology, as will Ember’s leadership and support of ZigBee.