Motorola pushes ZigBee networking

Motorola has started shipping hardware and software samples to development partners in support of the draft IEEE 802.15.4 high-speed wireless networking standard being touted by the ZigBee Alliance.

The company claimed that the standard fills a void in the wireless networking spectrum by allowing designers to create products with low cost, very low power and highly flexible wireless networking capabilities.

According to Motorola, "thousands" of applications for products incorporating ZigBee technology will soon exist in both the enterprise and home markets.

ZigBee-enabled products are engineered to allow businesses to automate, control and wirelessly connect their enterprise systems with energy management, predictive maintenance, logistics management, and automation and control systems, the vendor said.

"The ZigBee protocol addresses the needs of businesses and consumers requiring a low power, highly configurable network standard," said Behrooz Abdi, vice president and general manager of Motorola's Radio Products Division.

"Motorola sees an enormous potential for this technology, and has been developing the silicon, hardware and software to fuel the market. We are eager to fulfil the vision of a networked future."

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard details the physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) specifications for products, and offers the building blocks for different types of networking known as star, mesh and cluster tree.

Network routing schemes are designed to ensure power conservation and low latency through guaranteed time slots.

And the ZigBee network's communication redundancy feature eliminates the possibility of a 'single point of failure' in mesh networks.

Key features of the PHY include energy and link-quality detection, and clear channel assessment for improved coexistence with other wireless networks.

The MAC specifies automatic packet acknowledgement, provides options for transmission in a range of pre-selected time intervals and supports 128bit AES security. The MAC and ZigBee application software is implemented in code-efficient Ram/Rom devices.

Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector has promoter status within the ZigBee Alliance and driving member status in the IEEE 802.15.4 Task Group.