There is an alliance that was formed way back in 2003, 2004. It’s around 200-250 companies came together and they decided that they want a standard for wireless communication. Specifically they don’t want to focus on bluetooth, which is point to point with higher data rate. They want to focus focus on markets where data gets send across buildings and large area, potentially traversing multiple hops. AND everything needs to be really low power. So zigbee actually defines a mesh network protocol between devices out in the field. It’s a lot more than that, it’s not just a mesh network protocol. But the idea being that it’s not just a point to point protocol market whereas one device sending data to another device. Or streaming audios or videos. It’s is more suitable for sensor, monitoring, control type applications AND low power. Battery operated devices.
It is important to cover the alternatives to ZigBee because in that sense, it gives you a better idea of what kind of application suits ZigBee and what not. There are some miscommunication going on in the field where, people heard zigbee and zigbee is the end-all-be-all solution. But in a lot of places mention from previous slide such as, streaming audios/video, point to point application. You don’t need the full comprehensive zigbee mesh network protocol. In those scenario, for example you just have one device reporting in, through 5 feet. Maybe those are more suitable to use 802.15MAC Layer, it’s not full zigbee. It’s just the physical and the mac component of it. So it can gets you point to point or point to multi-point communication. One of the key major buzz word for zigbee is the interoperability. That’s to say, I want my device to work with some other vendors device without us collaborating on the side. Because ZigBee is a global standard protocol, our devices can work together. And the second big buzz word is the Mesh Network. So being able to get a large network devices with redundancy in the data path from the sensor to a sink, Or point where we’re sending out data, which is usually a pc or a handheld.
I will mention some highlight of the cc2530…
101dBm link budget: to maximize communication range, best in class selectivity to minimize the effect of interference sources. Flexible low-power modes: to maximize longevity of battery operated device.Powerful 5-channel DMA engine: IR generation circuitry: for remote control application Up to 256k of flash for those applications that requires a little more code space.