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ZigBee comes back from wireless graveyard? or 'it's just good exercise?'

Ember Europe designs wireless chips; it has decided to invest in the expertise required to make, not Bluetooth or WiFi, but ZigBee. Why? It's not as if the world is full of ZigBee customers.

ZigBee is wireless that almost never works. That is, it's aimed at applications where it mostly switches itself off, and doesn't drain a battery - so it can work for years. One example (often quoted) would be in wireless light switches.

The Ember announcement says that yes, the world will be full of ZigBee customers, one day; but that even if it turns out otherwise, it's good practice for Ember.

OK, it doesn't quite say that. What it actually says is that "the Cambridge-based IC design facility of the leading ZigBee platform vendor, Ember, is set to double in size by the end of 2006, following the announcement of the company's development partnership with STMicroelectronics" and also:

"Without doubt, ZigBee is THE cutting edge of single-chip wireless", said Nick Horne, Director of IC Engineering at Ember Europe.  "Wireless-enabling sensors demands such an extreme combination of price and performance that we expect to set a new standard of innovation, one that could offer a model of economy for the other more performance-oriented wireless schemes for some time to come."

Few in the wireless chip business think they are going to make their fortunes from ZigBee. One prominent Bluetooth designer has freely admitted that it has a ZigBee design faculty, not because it expects to sell any, but simply so that it can bid for ZigBee projects, and then, during the tender, switch them to Bluetooth.

Right now, said this designer recently to NewsWireless, there are dozens of projects calling for ZigBee wireless, which are in fact much easier - and far cheaper - if you use Bluetooth. "The light switch application is just something people quote to show how it works. Nobody is actually planning a building with wireless light switches, and maybe nobody ever will. But if you did, why would you want battery-powered switches, when you have mains power available?"

Ember is, for the record, convinced that ZigBee will make it. "The IC design challenges that face Ember Europe include finding ways to minimise the number of external components usually required to build a radio, the use of fine geometry semiconductor fabrication processes in a way that does not degrade radio performance, obtaining high radio sensitivity in close proximity to high clock rate digital circuits, and optimising operating modes and power management schemes to suit ultra-long lifetime operation from battery power," said today's announcement.

And it adds: "The rewards of getting these designs right promise to be market sizes that will dwarf all current wireless applications combined." That's almost certainly true, but the point (say other <1/>designers) is that any work done to get ZigBee technology competitive, will be very useful to Ember in any wireless technology field.

Currently, ZigBee isn't winning contracts, simply because the costs of manufacturing ZigBee chips are still (roughly) twice those of making a Bluetooth design; and for 90% of applications, chip and component costs are more important than extending a battery life from months to years.

So, it's good exercise for Ember's designers:

"Nearly 10 billion microcontrollers are shipped per year. A very large proportion of those are direct targets for ZigBee enabling, and we expect ZigBee to stimulate many additional applications", notes Horne.  "This is certainly no design backwater - it's likely to position engineers at the very hub of both the semiconductor industry and the 21st century global economy."

Ember sees Cambridge as a great site for this centre of IC design excellence, because of the region's long association with electronics and wireless design, and the general lifestyle attractions of the area.

But don't expect it to be making a billion ZigBee components a year, even if some reports of this announcement interpret it this way...

  Tags: ZigBee, Bluetooth