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Zigbee to Move into Cell Phones
By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 6/7/2006
Just when it seemed like every imaginable function had already been added into cell phones – from cameras, to televisions to Internet browsers to MP3 players – companies have started looking at incorporating yet something else – automation remote control.
Among the devices Freescale is targeting for future Zigbee products is the consumer cell phone market, with an eye to providing home owners with the ability to control various home automation functions as easily as they would call in a pizza order.
“There is probably not a cell phone maker out there that is not evaluating to some degree Zigbee,” said Brett Black, commercial wireless operations manager at Freescale. “There are others that are doing pilot builds.”
According to Black, Zigbee in cell phones is part of a larger evolution of the IEEE standard for industrial and home automation. The next generation of Zigbee, which is a wireless peer-to-peer mesh network protocol, will more deeply penetrate the residential space. So why not use a common device such as a cell phone to control the network.
“We expect to see some solutions in the market place by mid-next year,” Black said. “And these will be more than just a small reference designs. These will be actual products.” But for the most part Zigbee in cell phones is more like two to four years away. Zigbee home networks must be in place before it makes sense to give cell phones the capability to control them.
But Black remains enthusiastic about Zigbee’s prospects in home automation. And Zigbee has been gaining momentum at Freescale, he said.
“We have thousands of opportunities,” he said. “Our Zigbee technology web home page is number one in terms of hits for the RF business. I’ve never been around a product that has so much market pull.” And those opportunities have translated into hundreds of design commitments and design wins, he said.
To further penetrate the market, particularly for small footprint applications such as cell phones, Freescale is developing a single-chip Zigbee device that it will officially announce later this year.
“If you are not an expert in Zigbee it is a pretty sophisticated set of protocols that can be complex,” he said. “We are trying to make it easy.”
The single-chip solution will also offer a significant reduction in cost. While Black could not offer many details, on a Freescale platform he estimated cost savings would be 25 percent to 35 percent on a bill of materials level.
And what’s beyond the cell phone in terms of new devices for Zigbee?
“The remote controls that you use in the home will transition from infrared to RF,” said Black. “RF offers two-way acknowledgement. We believe there will be some major change in that direction in the next five to seven years.”
