NEC Electronics and Skyley Networks Announce Compliance of ZigBee Platform

The enhanced ZigBee PRO feature set offers network scalability to larger networks with enhanced management options with flexibility. By upgrading the NECEL/Skyley ZigBee platform for compliance to the ZigBee PRO specifications, OEMs and system developers can easily develop low power, wireless self-organizing and self-healing mesh networking ideal for the rapidly growing field of energy management systems, industrial and residential building management systems, lighting controls, automated meter reading, sensors, and security systems.

Because the ZigBee PRO compliant stack has already been ported to 78K0 and V850ES microcontrollers, developers can choose to build their systems using any of NEC Electronics’ All Flash™ microcontrollers, including the 8-bit 78K0, the 16-bit 78K0R, and the 32-bit V850ES microcontrollers. The company now boasts a lineup of nearly 400 devices, allowing customers to select the MCU that meets the precise needs for the applications they want to develop.

The ZigBee wireless technology operates over 2.4 gigahertz frequency, and can be used to transmit up to 250 kilobits/second of data in a 70 meter radius, with such low power consumption that devices can be operated using standard dry batteries.

In recent years the evolution of self-organizing and self-healing peer-to-peer mesh networks based on such devices, which can communicate directly with each other without needing to communicate via a central server, has spurred growth of wireless technologies such as ZigBee, and the market for ZigBee-based products is expected to increase to 200 million units by 2010, and 500 million units by 2015. The ZigBee PRO Feature Set offers, compared to the ZigBee Feature Set, flexible and various management options of network routing, address management, multicast and group addressing, link quality management, and fragmentation of large data. It eases efforts to manage larger and more stable networks. To capture this potential market, NEC Electronics and Skyley have leveraged their respective strengths in embedded microcontroller solutions and peer-to-peer network technology, first announcing a jointly developed platform in November 2006.

The companies expect that the market for ZigBee wireless systems will continue to grow in both size and scope, and plan to actively improve and expanding upon their existing ZigBee platforms and solutions to help customers reduce development times and costs associated with developing ZigBee products.