First ZigBee co-processor chip from Ember

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interface. Ember

From the website:

Pricing and availability The InSight EM260 Development Kit with EZSP is available immediately in two versions: a "Jumpstart" kit priced at $2,500, and a full kit at $10,000.

Sounds and looks just fine, shame about the price though..

I'm not clear on how this is different from the Ember/Chipcon EM2420. That also was a ZigBee co-processor. At first Ember sold it in a kit with an ATmel microcontroller, and later they sold it with a TI MSP430 microcontroller.

It is clearly different from the Ember EM2430, which seems to be the EM2420 bundled with a 8051.

The development kit pricing is consistant with Ember's earlier products. I'd love to see the pricing for the 40 pin QFN in modest quantities. The EM2420 was only about $10 in small numbers of thousand quantities.

Also would be interesting to know if this is a unique to Ember product, most of their earlier stuff was co-developed with ChipCon.

They selected the right name - I definitely jumped when I saw the price :-(

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interface. Ember

Hi, Jim:

Just to clarify - the price is for the development kit, not the chip...!

Ember appears to have a very high end business model (as evidence by dev kit prices). They don't seem to be supporting small developers - yet.

-Bill.

Hi Pat,

In the interest of full disclosure, I do work for ember, and I would encourage all questions to be directed to snipped-for-privacy@ember.com or snipped-for-privacy@ember.com (you can post the replies to this group if you wish). I was just trolling around this group and noticed some questions about Ember that I could answer.

How is the EM260 different from the Em2420? The Em2420 was just a radio with no micro. The interface to the EM2420 was in the PHY layer: So, any Network, MAC, and even some PHY layer stuff was handled by the host (i.e. the MSP430 or the AVR).

In contrast, the EM260 includes a micro core and runs the entire ZigBee stack. The interface to this chip is above the network layer. The SPI based API is essentially a port of our normal stack API.

The goal was to both free up the host processor resources to do other things (such as motor control), and to also makes it easy to port the device driver to the micro of your choice or even to write your own. The Em260 is the only part in the market where the interface is just above the NWK layer.

Finally, someone on this thread asked whose silicon this is. It is entirely Ember's silicon, unlike the EM2420. We purchased the 802.15.4 group from Cambridge Consultants (they spun off CSR, the Blue Tooth guys) some years back, and both the Em250 and the Em260 are based on technology this team developed.

I hope this helps!

-D.C.

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prices).

Did that model work for Lonworks?

I'd be interested to know if they are willing to support small developers in any way. Are the datasheets available without being *qualified*, meaning being someone that will buy less than 1k the first year? Are small quantities available through distribution without major hassles?

I would expect to see a TI version of this as a single chip in the foreseeable future, since TI now owns Chipcon.

ut oh, you might know something,

OK, that is a key distinction.

I personally think this is a better design structure, the MSP430 runs out of address space pretty quickly when you try to run both the ZigBee (or EmberNet) stack and some application code, so it isn't clear to me how much real application work one can do with an EM2420 anyway, without another processor. This design lets you know where the edges of the design are.

It would be nice to see some development kits at lower price points, say chop a zero off them.

Maybe you are using the wrong microcontroller ;-)

Having a two CPU solution where one of the CPUs are dedicated to Zigbee will

• makes life easier for the developer they do not have to learn too much about Zigbee,
• makes support easier for the Zigbee vendor.
• Makes life easier for management, since they have to invest less into making a working product.

If you can run the Zigbee on a single chip, with just a transceiver that at least sounds lower cost and lower power consumption to me. Then again, if the transceivers are not migrated to better technologies, then they will remain in price and the integrated controllers will drop eventually below the cost of the transceiver only. This is what happened with Bluetooth.

Even given that Ulf may be biased, this is a distinct possibility.

Of course, Ember said not long ago that the MSP430 was a great microcontroller for this application.

And to be fair, the MSP430 model in the Ember kit is not the most flexible one on the TI product line.

This I totally agree with. The downside is a slightly higher BOM