As per In-Stat’s latest data on market for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless personal area networking (PAN), the ZigBee specification network layer and other proprietary protocols could grow 200% by 2009—with annual shipments surpassing 150 million units in 2009. Microchip is currently addressing the needs of this market with the only zero-cost-license and royalty-free ZigBee protocol stack, which is one of the smallest in the industry and provides a source-code format that allows designers to customize their product, utilizing Microchip’s broad portfolio of compatible PIC microcontrollers, according to Microchip.

To offer complete solution for this emerging market, the company has developed a proprietary transceiver based on 0.18 micron RF CMOS process. With the addition of MRF24J40 integrated transceiver, Microchip now offers a complete ZigBee protocol platform. Besides requiring very few external components, the radio also offers low power consumption and performance that exceeds all IEEE 802.15.4 specifications, with full media access controller (MAC) support and an advanced encryption standard (AES) hardware encryption engine.

In addition to its first RF transceiver for the 2.4GHz ZigBee application, the company has also developed a wireless network analyzer tool to enable development of ZigBee protocol systems using its semiconductors. It is called ZENA. It uses a simple graphical interface to configure the free Microchip ZigBee and MiWi protocol stacks. This enables customers to reduce the code size of the stacks by removing optional features; cuts development time by simplifying the interactions with the stacks; and allows customization of the stack to fit a particular need. Consisting of both hardware and software, the ZENA wireless network analyzer is an IEEE 802.15.4 protocol analyzer that is capable of decoding ZigBee and MiWi protocol packets—from the lowest layers to the top of the stack (including the security modules). The network-configuration display window allows users to see the traffic in real time, as it travels from one node to another. A session can also be saved to a file, to allow further analysis of all the network traffic.

Speaking of proprietary protocol MiWi, it is a small-footprint protocol for customers who do not need ZigBee protocol interoperability but want to use IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers in low-cost peer-to-peer, star and mesh networks. In fact, according to Microchip, the MiWi protocol provides the lowest-cost fully functional network protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers.

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