Inventing the future

News Release from: Ember Europe
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 14 September 2005

TI MCU and Zigbee chip combine for networking

Ember Corporation has announced that the industry's lowest power ZigBee networking platform, which it developed jointly with Texas Instruments, will start shipping next month.

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Ember Corporation has announced that the industry's lowest power ZigBee networking platform, which it developed jointly with Texas Instruments, will start shipping next month. ZigBee is a wireless, standards-based radio technology designed for remote monitoring, control and sensor network applications including home control and awareness, building automation, industrial automation, asset management and homeland security. Ember also announced that customers have already attended training at Ember to get an early start in the development of wireless applications based on the new platform, which is currently undergoing final quality assurance testing.

These include a sensor application being developed by a US Government defence agency, and a wireless, wearable, nonintrusive monitor for the healthcare and eldercare markets being developed by AFrame Digital, a Virginia based healthcare products and technology company.

'AFrame is excited to move to the Ember TI MSP430 Development Kit because this new chip combination will significantly increase the battery lifespan of our product in its small form factor', said Linda Bonanno, CTO and EVP of engineering at AFrame Digital.

'Ember has developed a best in class low-power ZigBee solution that AFrame can leverage for our healthcare monitoring solution for the eldercare and chronic disease management markets'.

The new ZigBee platform integrates Ember's proven and ZigBee compliant EM2420 radio transceiver, and EmberZNet software platform with TI's 16bit MSP430F1612 microcontroller (MCU) into a complete, dual-chip ZigBee/802.15.4 solution.

It is designed for OEMs building ZigBee applications that require the lowest possible power requirements, as well as for companies who have already standardised on the TI MCU and wish to ZigBee-enable their products quickly and easily.

The 2.4GHz Ember EM2420 is the highest performing, most power-efficient radio transceiver in its class, providing a flexible, simple interface to a wide range of microcontrollers.

The low power TI MCU will also be paired with Ember's recently announced EM260, network processor solution which will be available early next year.

The MSP430F1612 ultra-low-power MCU offers the industry's lowest current consumption with only 1.1uA standby mode with real-time clock operation, as well as a 300uA (1MHz) active mode that allows engineers to tune system clocking to meet precise power requirements.

With fast instruction execution enabled by a modern 16bit RISC CPU, a startup time of less than 6us from standby and a fully synchronised, high-speed system clock, the chip's total power consumption is 10 times lower than competing devices.

Customers can quickly start building ZigBee applications with Ember's Developer Kit that includes all the hardware, development tools, and software needed to prototype robust, decentralised device networks using the new Ember/TI chipset.

The kit can be ordered from Ember's website at starting at $4995 for the JumpStart Kit and $13,950 for the Full Developer Kit.

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