Alliance certifies ZigBee compliance

Ember has become one of the first companies to earn official ZigBee-compliant status, according to the ZigBee Alliance.

Ember has become one of the first companies to earn official ZigBee-compliant status, according to the ZigBee Alliance.

The certification is significant for Ember customers and partners because it brings a host of benefits, including: ZigBee-compliant marketing and promotional validation for their products, assured interoperability with other vendor's ZigBee-compliant platform based products, additional consumer credibility and market acceptance for their products, and assurance that their own end-user products will have to undergo minimal ZigBee platform compliance when they undergo 3rd-party testing, thus speeding product entry into the market.

"Achieving ZigBee platform compliance is a nice milestone for Ember".

"But the real story is what it means to our customers and partners", said Venkat Bahl, Ember's Vice President of Marketing.

"Companies like Philips Lighting, Eaton, Control4, Raymarine, NURI Telecom and Tour Andover Controls have been waiting for ZigBee-compliant platforms for a long time".

"The ability to market their Ember-enabled products with official ZigBee-compliant designation will bring the same kind of market acceptance and excitement that Wi-Fi certification brought to wireless LAN vendors".

Take, for example, Salt Lake City-based Control4, whose Ember-enabled home automation technology won the prestigious CES Best of Innovations Award and recently signed a mass distribution agreement with Tweeter.

Control4 will be able to boost consumer appeal for its home control products - including ZigBee-based media management, audio servers, AV control, lighting control and thermostats - by promoting them as fully ZigBee-compliant, said Jim Gist, Control4's Director of Business Development.

"Designing to a moving target is never easy, as we discovered while waiting for ZigBee ratification".

"Ember helped bridge the obstacles", he said.

"We relied on Ember's innovation and leadership in the ZigBee space".

"It pioneered the first comprehensive development platform for ZigBee-ready applications, and that platform serves as the golden suite for 802.15.4 interoperability".

"And today's ZigBee compliance announcement proves our bet on Ember paid off well in the end".

Ember was one of four initial companies to pass initial compliance testing conducted by National Technical Systems and TUV Rheinland, the test houses contracted by the ZigBee Alliance.

In fact, Ember's wireless semiconductor system was chosen as the National Technical Systems' "Golden Suite" standard by which all other IEEE802.15.4 products are tested for compliance and interoperability.

Ember is a promoter of the ZigBee Alliance, with Ember executives serving in strategic and standard-setting roles.

Today's certification culminates nearly a year's worth of extensive interoperability testing that Ember underwent with other alliance members.

"Ember has taken a leadership role in this process, and the Alliance appreciates its contributions and willingness to undergo the extensive test scenarios to help create a rigorous compliance test programme for all members", said Bob Heile, Chairman of the ZigBee Alliance.

Ember's ZigBee-compliant platform is designed to be a complete, rapid-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.

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