"We've been testing with each other since December 2003," said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance, "and now we're coming out of the gate with four platforms with the full [IEEE 802.15.4] radio and ZigBee stack — the complete platform." The platforms are from CompXs Inc., Ember Corp., Chipcon Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The latter two use a ZigBee protocol stack from Figure 8 Wireless, which Chipcon acquired in January.

"This is tremendously important," said Jon Adams, director of radio technology for the Wireless and Mobile Systems Group of Freescale Semiconductor (Tempe, Ariz.). "We can now actually get ZigBee-compliant platforms out to developers."

Heile said the ZigBee Alliance's testing went up to right below the applications layer; applications testing is a goal for the second quarter. "We didn't test the profiles yet, but that's much simpler to accomplish — there are far fewer variables," he said. The lead profile is lighting, which Heile said is already done. Others to follow include HVAC, security, home automation and industrial process control.

ZigBee is not alone in targeting the lighting and home automation markets. In January, Zensys AS disclosed formation of the Z-Wave Alliance around its proprietary 900-MHz wireless technology. ZigBee operates in sub-1-GHz and 2.45-GHz bands.

Raoul Wijgergangs, vice president of business development for Zensys (Upper Saddle River, N.J.), claimed that Z-Wave has already cornered the lighting and home automation markets because of its lower cost, lower complexity and better range than ZigBee. "We have partnerships with Leviton, Danfoss, Honeywell and UEI," he said, referring to leading switch and home automation vendors. "All that's left is [switch maker] Lutron [Electronics] — and they're doing their own system. There's no one left for ZigBee — they're not in the ecosystem, and it's going to be incredibly difficult to get a foothold."

Adams of Freescale disagreed. "The early market for home automation is a cottage industry," he said. "No one company has pulled all the pieces together, including Zensys."

"There will always be an ultralow-end play for Zensys," said Heile, acknowledging Z-Wave's less-complex protocol stack, "but we have multiple companies shipping silicon and they don't." Wijgergangs countered by saying that a number of major semiconductor suppliers will announce Z-Wave support in the coming months. Zensys has been shipping "interoperable" silicon for a year, he added.

"We shipped a half million chips in 2004, we have 70 [distinct product lines] and will have 250 by year's end," he said. In addition, he noted that the company is about to announce its second-generation technology, which will be a full system-on-chip that requires only 15 external components for a finished design.

With pricing under $3, Wijgergangs claimed a lower price point than ZigBee's. Heile put ZigBee pricing at under $5 per module. "But that assumes a full implementation," Heile said, noting that it's possible to scale back the stack and media-access control to what he called a "mini-MAC" or "mini-stack."

Adams put the price of Freescale's chips at $3.26 in volume. "And we operate at 250 kbits/second, while Zensys is at 9.6 kbaud — 1/25 of our rate," he added.

With four platforms now tested, Heile said he expects the figure to jump quickly to six or seven.