Ember, a wireless semiconductor solutions company which has emerged as the ZigBee market frontrunner, today became 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 WiFi 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 IEEE 802.15.4
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 program 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.
About Ember Corporation
Ember Corporation develops ZigBee-compliant wireless semiconductor
solutions that help buildings consume less energy, manufacturing
plants run with fewer breakdowns, and the country’s borders and
infrastructure remain safe and secure. Its vision is to help create an
”Internet of things” by enabling the eight billion microcontrollers
built into products each year to support low-cost, low-power
networking applications in any industry. Headquartered in Boston with
offices and distributors worldwide, the company was named one of
Fortune Magazine’s top “Cool Companies” and Red Herring’s “Top 100
Innovators” for 2004. For more information, please visit
www.ember.com.
