By Jim Strothman
The chairman of the ZigBee Alliance expects shipments of ZigBee wireless technology chips to double this year, compared to 2005, and increase fivefold in 2007.
ZigBee is an open standard for creating inexpensive, low-power, wirelessly networked monitoring and control products. Typical applications range from HVAC and lighting monitoring in large building control systems to audiovisual control systems in the home. The ZigBee stack and applications run on IEEE 802.15.4 radios.
The ZigBee Alliance is a consortium of more than 100 companies developing monitoring and control products based on the ZigBee open global standard.
“We’re starting to see a real pickup in the adoptive (users adopting the technology) class,” said Bob Heile, ZigBee Alliance chairman. “We measure ZigBee growth by total volume of chips shipped, development kits shipped, and training programs.”
Heile said 11,000 ZigBee development kits were shipped in the past 12 months and over 10,000 engineers have gone through training programs year-to-date.
In 2005, 2.5 million chips were shipped, “and I’m projecting twice that in 2006,” he said. “I’m predicting five times that in 2007.”
Having a short range (70-100 meters) and being relatively slow (250 Kilobits per second), ZigBee is not going to compete head-on with the more powerful Wi-Fi or Bluetooth anytime soon.
For industrial control, ZigBee technology offers a standards-based wireless platform to remotely monitor and control applications at low-cost and with low radio frequency (RF) power requirements. A target market is replacing line-of-sight infrared technology used in remote controls.
IEEE 802.15.4 is one of several personal area network standards around, along with Bluetooth and ultrawideband.
The technology is most commonly used for building control and sensing tools, such as lighting, HVAC, and security. Some analysts believe 5 million to 100 million ZigBee chips could ship in the next few years.
Heile said he was “totally surprised,” but delighted, to hear about a mobile application being developed by the Italian communications giant Telecom Italia. The company has embedded ZigBee in a cell phone sim card, he said, and is developing point-of-sale applications for retailers, even allowing customer payments to be made securely.
ZigBee technology groups are looking at supporting regional bands below one gigahertz, he said, including the 906-928 MHz ISM band in the U.S., Australia, and some South American countries, and the band used for cordless microphones in Europe. In Japan, the Alliance is studying the 950 MHz band and, in China, 700 MHz.
The IEEE 802.15 Working Group is already at work on 802.15.4a, an update to the “Low Rate Alternative PHY.”
For related information, go to www.isa.org/productivity.