New Ember ZigBee Embedded Networking Processor Announced

BOSTON and OSLO, Norway, June 14, 2005 — On the heels of last week’s debut of the industry’s first ZigBee-on-a-chip solution, Ember today introduced a network processor version of the same product family for OEMs that prefer to build ZigBee applications using popular third-party microcontrollers.

ZigBee is a wireless network standard that targets low power remote monitoring, control, and network sensor applications.

The new Ember ZigBee EM260™ network processor provides all of the advanced ZigBee wireless networking features and functionality as Ember’s next-generation EM250™ ZigBee-on-a-chip, when used with microcontrollers from Atmel, Texas Instruments and others.

“The EM260 gives OEMs great flexibility in using the MCUs and tools in which they’ve already invested a significant amount of time, training and development expertise,” remarked Alf Bogen, Atmel’s AVR managing director. “The Atmel/EM260 platform lets OEMs leverage that investment to get up and running quickly on a next-generation ZigBee network and MCU integrated chipset.”

The EM260 platform provides a ZigBee-compliant network node with very low power consumption. it includes an integrated hardware AES 128-bit encryption engine using a true random number generator.

Besides being 100% ZigBee compliant, the EM260 also features EmberZNet™ 2.0, a new release of Ember’s networking stack featuring a number of enhancements designed to extend ZigBee functionality, simplicity and performance.

Beyond full support for the ZigBee standard, EmberZNet 2.0 supports application profiles for home controls as well as user-defined network applications. It also features an Ember transport layer to provide more reliable wireless communication between nodes and enable distributed bindings. The Ember transport layer, along with Ember’s application programming interface (API), allows Ember’s existing customers to port their EmberNet™ applications to the new ZigBee platform.

New Tools
The EM260 features a new development kit with unique software tools to further accelerate customers’ ZigBee time to market. Ember WorkBench provides a suite of tools for developing and debugging embedded ZigBee applications. It combines an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with distributed network debugging and visualization tools. Developers can connect to multiple target devices to control their application, upload firmware, and collect debugging information.

“Ember is building the pervasive standard for embedded wireless networking,” said Venkat Bahl, Ember’s Vice President of Marketing. “Our next-generation platform is based on years of extensive wireless networking experience from real-world implementations. The new platform gives OEMs a fully integrated, one-stop-shop solution that shields them from everything except what they do best: building applications.”

Pricing and availability
The Ember EM260 ZigBee embedded networking chip will be available this summer and costs less than $3.50 per unit in high volumes.

About ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs, and end-users worldwide.

About Ember Corporation
Ember Corporation develops ZigBee-compliant wireless semiconductor solutions that help automate homes, make buildings consume less energy, enable manufacturing plants to run with fewer breakdowns, and keep the country’s borders and infrastructure safe and secure. With more than 120 customers, Ember’s vision is to help create an “Internet of things” by enabling the eight billion microcontrollers built into products each year to support low-cost, low-power networking applications in any industry. Headquartered in Boston with offices and distributors worldwide, the company is a lead promoter of the ZigBee Alliance and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing.