To further strengthen its position in the wireless networking space, Freescale Semiconductor has readied a ZigBee-compliant development platform for a variety of monitoring, sensing, automation and control applications in the home, light commercial and industrial environments. TUV Rheinland of North America, a designated independent testing and assessment service of the ZigBee Alliance, confirmed Freescale's platform conforms to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and the ZigBee specification. The ZigBee Alliance selected National Technical Systems, Inc. and TUV Rheinland to be the official test houses of the Alliance and conduct the independent testing because of their proven national and international reputation and capability. Consequently, the test houses collaborated with the Alliance to develop a test program that includes standard test cases and reporting metrics.

Others to offer ZigBee-compliant platforms include Chipcon, CompXs, and Ember.

This announcement culminates after close to a year of effort by these companies, devoted to development of the compliance testing process and to the testing of these platforms. Since the ratification of the ZigBee specification in December 2004, the Alliance has been finalizing a formal compliance testing program for the ZigBee platform, which is a software and hardware design to enable OEMs to develop a wide range of ZigBee based products.

ZigBee-compliant platforms include the IEEE 802.15.4 radio and the ZigBee stack up to the application layer and will be available as either chips or modules for use in end products. The Alliance’s intensive testing approach is designed to ensure that products based on ZigBee-compliant platforms from different vendors will be able to form into a single cohesive ZigBee network capable of passing data for all applications on the network. This ensures multi-vendor interoperability of products based on the ZigBee platform and using an Alliance approved application. The Alliance expects to begin certification testing of end user products based on these platforms and ZigBee application profiles in the coming months.

“Since before the ZigBee specification was ratified, the Alliance has been developing a testing strategy so we could assure the market that all ZigBee products using a ZigBee platform and application would be interoperable,” said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance. “We spent the last quarter focused on finalizing this platform compliance process and are now executing a testing strategy intended to ensure the fast and successful development of ZigBee products by the member companies based on these platforms.

Freescale’s MC13193 Evaluation Kit (13193EVK-A00) offers the ZigBee-compliant platform, which includes best-in-class addition of development tools and builds on the success of the company’s MC13192 Developer's Starter Kit (13192DSK-A00). It offers a platform that supports full ZigBee networking capabilities and range in excess of 350 meters. The kit contains the necessary hardware and software to demonstrate and develop robust, affordable and easy-to-deploy ZigBee-compliant solutions, according to Freescale.

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