Easy PIC ZigBee Development from Ember and Microchip

Nov 2006. Microchip decided to use Ember’s ZigBee co-processor to deliver easy  Microchip-Zigbee solution. Microchip will offer users of the PIC16 and PIC18 families of 8-bit flash microcontrollers a simple solution to add ZigBee to their application with the Ember EM260 ZigBee co-processor.

Microchip will offer a reference design utilizing the PIC16F917 microcontroller, the EM260 ZigBee co-processor, and the EmberZNet networking stack and documentation. The reference design is available for immediate download from Ember’s developer community website at dev.ember.com/software, and is also expected to be available on Microchip’s website www.microchip.com in November 2006.

Mitch Obolsky, vice president of Microchip’s Advanced Microcontroller Architecture Division said:

We wanted to offer our customers a quick solution to ZigBee enable their products, without requiring them to be networking experts. The Microchip/Ember ZigBee solution allows them to use the PIC® microcontroller environment they already know and let the co-processor handle ZigBee…

About Amber, he said:

…We partnered with Ember because of the maturity, performance and advanced capabilities of its ZigBee co-processor…

According to In-Stat and Northern Sky Research, market for ZigBee devices is expected to reach $1 billion within years 2008 and 2010. ZigBee wireless embedded networking technology promises to enable billions of devices to support low-cost, low-power sensor and control applications, such as home and building automation, industrial controls, inventory management, automatic meter reading (AMR) and environmental monitoring.
 

Robert LeFort, CEO of Ember said:

The Microchip/Ember package shields PIC16 and PIC18 developers from the complexities of wireless embedded networking…

…It’s ideal for Microchip customers that have standardized on the popular PIC platform and wish to access ZigBee technology painlessly, 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 Microchip customers building ZigBee products dramatic reductions in component size, cost and power consumption, while delivering twice the wireless range of competitive ZigBee radios. 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.

About Microchip Technology
Microchip Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHP) is a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, providing low-risk product development, lower total system cost and faster time to market for thousands of diverse customer applications worldwide. Headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, Microchip offers outstanding technical support along with dependable delivery and quality.

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.

EmberZNet is a trademark of Ember Corporation. The Microchip name and logo, and PIC are registered trademarks of Microchip Technology Inc. in the USA and other countries. ZigBee is a trademark of the ZigBee Alliance.

Flashback, Nov 2005, EiED Online,  elecdesign.com:

Ember is a company targeting the Zigbee market with its own Zigbee transceiver while Silicon Labs and Microchip are microcontroller vendors. The design of the kits reflect this. For example, Ember’s kit is designed around a module that contains an Atmel Mega128L microcontroller and Ember’s EM2420 ZigBee chip suitable for deployment. The base board can support different modules because Ember provides single-chip solutions as well as support for other microcontrollers.

Silicon Labs’ and Microchip’s offerings are tied to their microcontrollers. Microchip’s board puts the ZigBee chip on a plug-in module that could, in theory, be used in a product but is really intended to provide designers with the ability to check out additional ZigBee chips. Silicon Labs has a single board designed to highlight one combination of chips.

One major implication about the offerings is based on the amount of time the vendors have been dealing with ZigBee. Ember’s offering is the most mature, since they were in on the ground level. Silicon Labs and Microchip waited for the standard and transceiver chip availability, so their offerings are not as polished.

Sep, 2006. Ember Corporation announced it will demonstrate this week at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in Boston and the ZigBee Open House in Seoul, Korea, how easy it is to ZigBee enable devices from a variety of manufacturers and have them operate as a low-power wireless mesh network.

Ember will show a lighting control network of devices powered by microcontrollers from a variety of vendors, including STMicroelectronics, Atmel, ADI, Microchip and SiLabs. The devices are paired with Ember’s EM260 ZigBee co-processor, running the EmberZNet™ ZigBee stack to form the network. The network also includes devices with Ember’s own EM250 system-on-a-chip (SoC).
 

Robert LeFort, CEO of Ember said:

More than eight billion microcontrollers are shipped each year. We wanted to demonstrate how virtually any of those products can be ZigBee networked easily and quickly…

….We want to make ZigBee ubiquitous by enabling customers to network any microcontroller of their choice and foster new breakthroughs in improved energy conservation, safety, and comfort in building and home automation applications, among others.

The demo illustrates that OEMs don’t have to re-engineer their products to add low-power wireless communications capabilities. They can continue to use their preferred microcontrollers and development tools, while letting Ember’s EM260 handle the ZigBee networking through EZSP - a simple plug-and-play SPI interface to their chips. Existing products can be seamlessly migrated to become wireless ZigBee-enabled devices by simply adding the EM260 network co-processor and using a standard interface to the existing microcontroller.

Source: Microchip, Ember, ElecDesign