Jennic reduces pricing on ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 development kits

Jim Lindop, CEO of Jennic, stated, “Jennic has established itself as a leader in the ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 space with our single chip wireless microcontrollers, complete with software tools and the entire support library available free of charge via web download from our support site. Now we’re the first company to offer a fully featured five node ZigBee development kit for under $500. This announcement is based on much feedback from our OEM customer base wishing to move to provide entire engineering teams with our development hardware to reduce time to market. The obvious benefit is this places our kits within range of smaller companies wishing to enter the ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 market as OEMs or third party developers.”

Glen Allmendinger, president and founder of Harbor Research added, “Jennic has established itself as a successful first mover in this space, continuously delivering its products ahead of schedule. The first generation single chip product was delivered in 2004, ten months before the next single chip offering, with the latest JN513X reaching the market almost six months earlier than it had projected in our briefings. The new pricing indicates the company has the product and support maturity to handle customers by the thousands rather than hundreds. We believe the development conversion rate for its tools sold in America exceeds 80 percent. Its new low cost development tools seem to feature capabilities normally associated with higher priced development environments; together with sub $3 parts and a viable roadmap to sub $2, this could signal an inflection point in the uptake of ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 technology.”