ZigBee Alliance accelerates IoT unification with 20 certified silicon platforms

by Brianna Crandall — January 6, 2017 — The ZigBee Alliance, a nonprofit association of diverse companies creating, maintaining and delivering open, global standards for the low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT), recently announced that eight member companies have achieved certification for 20 silicon platforms that form the basis for ZigBee 3.0 products.

The large number of certifications gives product developers broad supply chain options of multiple silicon platform sources for building lighting solutions, energy devices, sensors, controllers, gateways and other IoT objects that will work together using the industry’s most widely deployed common language between IoT devices. These and other compliant options moving forward are expected to help drive benefits and capabilities to a significantly broader range of IoT applications and markets.

Certified ZigBee 3.0 silicon platforms are now available from Atmel, Exegin, Qorvo (formerly GreenPeak Technologies), NXP, Samsung, Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments and ubisys, which serves the large community of ARM-based SOC developers. Many ZigBee Alliance companies are also building product offerings on top of these silicon platforms, such as module vendors and contract engineering firms including CEL (California Eastern Laboratories), Digi, DSR, MMB Networks, Murata and San Juan Software.

ZigBee 3.0-certified products based on the new platforms will be backward-compatible with existing ZigBee certified products that, collectively, represent the world’s largest installed base of IoT products, says the Alliance.  They will not just connect but also communicate using the same IoT language — speaking with each other and with millions of earlier ZigBee-certified solutions already deployed in smart homes, buildings and neighborhood area networks.

Central to the ZigBee Alliance value proposition is a commitment to standardizing product development across all IoT networking layers, from the lower layers defining how products connect, all the way to the critically important application layer that determines whether products can communicate, perform tasks with each other, and deliver a consistent, satisfying and secure user experience.

The organization believes its unique application-layer focus is poised to help unify a fragmented IoT that, until now, has been divided into multiple independent segments with products that could not interoperate without complex communication “translation” solutions — making it difficult to unlock growth opportunities or fuel innovation in smart homes, workplaces and cities.

For more information, visit the ZigBee Alliance Web site.