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WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY
ZigBee: A new wireless standard
By Hiroshi Ide
What if you could monitor your front door and be able to remotely unlock it from your PC? What if you could control your home sprinkler system from your cell phone? Wireless networking has become the next wheel. What would we do without it? From Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, wireless networking has revolutionized the way we communicate, and the way our favorite devices communicate with each other. But what's next for in-home machine-to-machine communications?
Enter ZigBee--a low-power, low-cost wireless connectivity standard that stands to take over the world of home and building automation. The newly introduced IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee wireless standard for short distance wireless networks, also known as PANs (Personal Area Networks), will soon be embedded in just about any home and building automation device.
"What's next for in-home machine-to-machine communications?"
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ZigBee is designed to allow every system in the home to communicate with one another. ZigBee will link appliances such as light switches, garage door openers, smoke and fire detectors, audio and video remote controls, etc. It has the potential to connect many of these sensor devices in the home, office, and on the road effortlessly, increasing both productivity and economic value.
ZigBee is positioned to forge ahead of infrared and X10 technologies that are commonly used in home automation today. Unlike the one-way infrared, ZigBee shores-up a two-way signal and doesn't need a direct line of sight to communicate with other devices. ZigBee signals can even travel through doors and walls. Furthermore, X10 has about a 0.7 second delay, while users experience no delay with ZigBee devices.
One of the key necessities for ZigBee to become the dominant communication standard for consumer electronics is for it to support a widely used interface such as SDIO (Secure Digital Input/Output) within the chip set. The majority of current ZigBee chip sets tend to support SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) as their main interface. However, SPI may not be enough to broaden ZigBee's use in consumer applications.
Since many consumer electronic devices already support SD as the primary bus system, introducing the SDIO interface to ZigBee will open the door into much larger applications. Companies such as C-guys already offer a ZigBee SDIO card designed to convert an application signal to an SD signal (or vice versa).
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