When you think of "wireless networks," Ember Corp. (Boston) hopes that one day soon the name "ZigBee" will pop into your mind as quickly as Wi-Fi and RFID.
A nickname for a variant of the IEEE's 802.15.4 wireless protocol for low-power mesh (node-to-node) networks, ZigBee promises an interconnected world of low-cost embedded processors that work behind the scenes in industrial automation environments and supply chains to monitor processes and equipment, increase efficiency and reduce operations costs.
"Billions of microprocessors are shipped every year throughout the world, but 98% of them are not networked," says Robert Metcalfe, Ember's chairman and a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, the lead Ember investor. Metcalfe, founder of networking company 3Com Corp., helped develop the Ethernet LAN standard in the 1970s. Other Ember investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vulcan Ventures, as well as two partners, Chevron Corp. and Hitachi.
Metcalfe predicts the payoff for when embedded processors are able to communicate with each other to be analogous to networking desktop computers. "It wasn't until PCs got networked that they became truly valuable," he says. For example, if processors that monitor individual lights in industrial facilities could communicate energy consumption or working status data via a wireless network to a central management program, companies could more tightly control energy costs.
The ZigBee standard carves out a wireless niche between 802.11 and RFID. The former provides relatively high bandwidth networking (1.8M bits per second) and requires relatively high power consumption. ZigBee nodes, which cost about $5 each and transfer data at about 250 kilobits per second, run at such low power that batteries don't need recharging for years, according to Metcalfe.
Ember isn't the only company developing ZigBee chips, radio transceivers and related networking software for wireless data transfers. Competitors include Motorola subsidiary Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, TX) and Oslo-based Chipcon AS. But Ember's first-generation products arrived in 2003, which makes its follow-up versions among the most mature in the fledgling ZigBee market. In June, the company introduced both a ZigBee "system on a chip," which pairs an embedded processor with an 802.15.4 radio transceiver, and a new version of its EmberZNet networking software.
Initial buyers of Ember's embedded networking technology include Eaton Corp., Honeywell and Tyco Thermal Controls, which are using the hardware and software to develop commercial products for industrial and home applications. Most products are still in development, with the first round of commercial offerings slated for later this year.
Among the handful of Ember-based products in the development pipeline of Eaton Corp. are monitors for industrial electrical motors. Eaton chose Ember's offerings because of its low power consumption and the maturity of the networking software, says Dr. Jose A. Gutierrez, technology manager in Eaton's Milwaukee research lab. But he adds that, because ZigBee is an open standard, companies like Eaton may choose to adopt any competitor's products, depending on who's leading in the development competition at any given time.
The leaders in that race will be companies that find ways to further reduce power needs and the costs of ZigBee network nodes, says networking pioneer Metcalfe. Ember's game plan also includes new industry alliances with companies such as Texas Instruments and Atmel Corp.
"We're setting out to partner with microcontroller manufacturers so their customers can have benefits of ZigBee when using their tools and microcontrollers," Metcalfe says.