Renesas Electronics Europe and its Alliance Partner AND Technology Research have announced the ZigBee Pro module-based design kit which includes the Smart Energy1.1 profile. Based on Renesas' M16C/6byte single chip ZigBee silicon, the AND TR design kits are tuned to provide RF performance and have been tested for interoperability at ZigBee Smart Energy interoperability events. The design kits include TestZED modules that can be used in product prototyping and are pre-programmed with the Renesas ZigBee Pro stack as well as the Smart Energy 1.1 profile. The modules can be controlled via hyper-terminal commands.
In the advanced design kit, the specialist TestZED module is designed to interoperate with the bundled PC TestZED software and can function as either a ZigBee co-ordinator or router, depending on how it is initialised, claims the company. The TestZED PC software gives good visibility of network communications and enables direct testing of the ZigBee Profile and their developed application through the reading and writing to the individual attributes of the profile's clusters, according to the company. As a result, scenarios can be quickly set up and tested. The ConnectZED evaluation kits are available backed up with direct technical email and telephone support. The single chip silicon is claimed to offer a high level of integration including a 16bit CPU with an IEEE802.15.4 compliant 2.4GHz transceiver, up to 256kbyte of on-chip flash coupled with 20kbyte RAM and 8kbyte of data flash, in addition to many useful peripherals such as a four-channel DMA, multiple timers including watchdog, three channels of serial I/O, and eight-channel 10bit ADC.
