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San Diego, CA -
press release, July 17, 2003 - A new technology is emerging to revolutionize
the short range low power wireless market without most people even knowing
about it, reports ON World, a market research firm focused on emerging
wireless technologies. "Until Zigbee, short range, low powered wireless devices were too complex and expensive to gain market traction," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's Director of Research. "Zigbee changes all this by providing of ultra low power, low cost and highly reliable devices that are suited for a wide range of applications." "Advances in
microelectronics, micro-fabrication and wireless technologies are converging
with the Internet to produce a new generation of devices that communicate
in ever increasingly interconnected networks," says Hatler. Zigbee's
capabilities come very close to the futuristic vision of having pervasive
devices that permeate the environment in order to enhance our lives
without our knowledge. Designed to offer a variety of network topologies, Zigbee can be used in a more recent architecture called "mesh," or web layout whereby potentially millions of nodes per network may be deployed. Mesh mode enables any Zigbee device to set up a network even when it cannot see all the other ZigBee devices that may exist on the network. Mesh mode also makes it possible for ZigBee devices to communicate through walls, even through different floors of a building. An almost eerie feature of Zigbee's networking capibilities are that it enables networks to self-configure themselves and self-heal. This means that networks can re-route messages if any one node or nodes go down and the nodes can always transmit from their original position without needing to be configured manually. To start, Zigbee will replace Bluetooth for a wide range of applications that require very low power consumption, small node sizes and costs as low as under $1 per unit. These features makes Zigbee very attractive for several high volume market segments such as industrial automation and control, energy management, home automation and control and also gaming consoles and wireless remote toys. In the future, Zigbee will be used for a growing number of innovative applications such as asset management, interior architecture design and a range of logistics applications. For example, Zigbee radios could be used to determine the traffic flow in buildings or malls to optimize the a building' interior layout as well as automating temperature and lighting, etc. Its suitability for such a wide range of applications make Zigbee one of the fastest-growing, new wireless networking markets. ON World predicts that there will be more than 750 million Zigbee RF ICs shipped in 2007, for a market worth $1.5 billion. In addition to providing
mesh networking and sophisticated types of distributed computing throughout
these mesh networks, Zigbee's most attractive features are that it can
be implemented in very small nodes at ultra low costs. In addition,
because the nodes are inactive most the time, they have very low power
requirements. Motorola has just announced a IEEE 802.15.4 compliant
RF IC that is 5mm squared in size. Startup Millennial Net nodes, called
i-Beans, are about 2 x 2 cm and run on small, low-cost batteries for
years. Prices for Zigbee chips will start around $7 toward the end of
this year and will drop rapidly thereafter as will the size per node.
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