March 2005, Issue 176

Zeroing in on ZigBee (Part 2)
Chipsets and Source Code

USABILITY

You’ve seen press releases stating that some new IC has been tested in an exciting new area of electronics. Frequently, however, access to the new technology is blocked, because the samples are only for approved development partners only, or because of the sheer complexity of the devices. Let’s take a look at how to obtain affordable ZigBee-compatible hardware and software and use it at the chip level.

If you can place the transceiver and controller ICs on your own PCB in a suitable way for use with an 8-bit microcontroller, you can markedly reduce the cost of a project. This is desirable because a typical application for which ZigBee is suited may be comprised of many nodes. Using the naked IC on your own PCB makes key fob-size projects a reality. 

Sometimes it seems as though the growing complexity of these evermore capable standards are moving beyond the scope of designers with limited amounts of time and test equipment. Would you leap into a quick 802.11.x project on a rainy Sunday afternoon given the bare chipset and a soldering iron? Even using a ready-made solution with a PCMCIA card interface requires 30-odd I/O lines.

The packaging is also against you because of the advent of ball grid array packaging. It’s nearly impossible to work at the chip level with chip-scale packing. I define the birth of a new standard when the average electronics designer can buy a product sample in a leaded package at a reasonable low-quantity price without having to rely on $100,000 of RF test equipment to get it working. The CC2420 was the first product to deliver that ability on the workbench.