The Zigbee Alliance has introduced a scheme that will enable Zigbee certified products from its members to retain their certification mark when rebranded and sold by third parties.
Zigbee protocols are used to create short-range personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, medical device data collection, and other low-power low-bandwidth applications. Data rate is up to 250kbps and range up to 100 metres.
The alliance says the scheme creates new business opportunities for members, and makes it easy for new entrants to join the growing ecosystem of Zigbee certified products that work with major consumer and commercial IoT platforms.
It says participant and promoter members are now populating the online certification transfer tool with products available for certification transfer.
“To receive a certification transfer, you must be either a Zigbee Alliance Member (in good standing), or be a new company who has never been an Alliance member,” it says.
To be eligible products must have previously been certified by the Zigbee Alliance as Zigbee 3.0, Zigbee Smart Energy or Green Power devices and must be certified as ‘end products’.
Zigbee uptake tipped to surge
Earlier this month the ZigBee Alliance announced the results of research from market research firm ON World saying these “project an extremely favourable market for connected devices leveraging Zigbee Alliance technologies over the next five years.”
ON World said half a billion Zigbee chipsets had been sold to date and predicted that 802.15.4 mesh chipset sales would grow to 4.5 billion by 2023 with 85 percent based on Zigbee Alliance technology standards. ON World estimated that Zigbee makes up more than one-third of the smart home wireless sensor network chipset market.
(Zigbee is based on the physical layer and media access control defined in IEEE standard 802.15.4).
