Ember today announced at Sensors Expo 2006 the availability of its EM260™ ZigBee co-processor with a new flexible, open source interface, called EZSP, that makes it easy to integrate ZigBee networking capabilities with virtually any vendor’s microcontroller. The EM260 with EZSP offers customers the industry’s fastest and most flexible path to ZigBee integration using their preferred application microcontroller and tools.
Also available is the new InSight™ EM260 Development Kit, a complete toolkit including hardware, ZigBee networking stack, EZSP serial interface, and development and debugging software all delivered in a single, integrated development environment.
The EM260 is the world’s only ZigBee co-processor. It allows OEM customers to choose their preferred microcontroller to run their application – such as those from STMicroelectronics, Atmel, Texas Instruments, Renesas, Freescale, NEC, Intel, Infineon, Microchip, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba and others – while letting the EM260 handle all the ZigBee networking functionality. With this unique approach, hardware suppliers and their application developers do not have to port an entire ZigBee protocol stack onto their microcontrollers. This makes more memory and processing resources available for the application. ZigBee processing is completely off-loaded to the EM260 co-processor.
The EM260 with EZSP and the InSight toolkit allows customers to ZigBee-enable existing products quickly and easily, or rapidly prototype new products, using the application development tools they are familiar with. The EZSP provides a plug-and-play, open source programming interface that facilitates communication between the microcontroller application and the EM260 chip over a standard high-speed serial interface.
“The EM260 with EZSP is a unique solution that effectively shields engineers from the complexities of wireless embedded networking,” said Bob LeFort, Ember’s CEO. “It’s ideal for customers that have standardized on a particular microcontroller, and wish to tap into the booming ZigBee wireless market quickly without having to rewrite and port their application code to a new platform.”
The EM260 integrates an IEEE 802.15.4 radio, network processor and onboard memory to run a complete ZigBee network protocol stack. It offers companies building ZigBee-enabled products dramatic reductions in component size, cost and power consumption, while delivering twice the wireless range of competitive ZigBee radios. The EM260 is designed to work with EmberZNet™, Ember’s ZigBee networking stack featuring a number of Ember enhancements that extend ZigBee functionality, simplicity and performance. In addition to full support for the ZigBee standard, EmberZNet supports application profiles for home controls as well as user-defined network applications. It also features an Ember transport layer to provide more reliable wireless communication between nodes and enable distributed bindings.
Pricing and availability
The InSight EM260 Development Kit with EZSP is available immediately in two versions: a “Jumpstart” kit priced at $2,500, and a full kit at $10,000.
About ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs, and end-users worldwide. Membership is open to all. Additional information can be found at www.zigbee.org.
About Ember Corporation
Ember enables communication among embedded microcontrollers with standards-based wireless mesh networking semiconductors and software. Ember helps its customers to automate home appliances, lower energy consumption in buildings, keep borders and infrastructure secure, and control industrial processes, just to name four of the many diverse applications being developed by Ember’s more than 100 customers. Spun out of MIT in 2001, Ember is headquartered in Boston and has its radio development center in Cambridge, England, and distributors worldwide. Ember is a lead member of the ZigBee Alliance, and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more information, please visit www.ember.com.
