Zigbee

Why Nordic?

For your Zigbee product

Nordic Semiconductor has low power wireless in its DNA. We ship more than one million ICs every day. With more than 40% market share in Bluetooth LE, we are the Bluetooth Low Energy market leader. We used this experience and expanded it to other technologies, like Zigbee. 

Our devices can be a great choice to base your new product platform on. With different sizes and capabilities our SoCs. The devices are similar to one another which enables excellent code portability between devices. This increases your software reusability and can reliably improve your time to market.
Our SoCs can run both Bluetooth Low Energy and Thread/Zigbee/Bluetooth mesh concurrently. The radio time is time-sliced and shared between the protocols. The scheduling is autonomous and maintains connections. A perfect choice for multi-protocol applications.

The nRF52 and nRF53 Series SoCs can be re-programmed in the factory or in the field with over-the-air device firmware upgrades (OTA DFU). This enables product updates and feature additions in the field. 

Our software offering for Zigbee development is the nRF Connect SDK. The nRF Connect SDK is a software development kit for building products based on our nRF52, nRF53 and nRF91 Series wireless devices. It integrates the Zephyr RTOS and a wide range of samples, application protocols, protocol stacks, libraries and hardware drivers. It includes DSR's industry-proven Zigbee 3.0 stack, ZBOSS, optimized for minimal resource usage and high performance. The nRF52840 and the nRF52833 SoC with the nRF Connect SDK are Zigbee compliant platforms, ensuring interoperability according to specification. 

Overview

Zigbee is a wireless self-organizing and self-fixing mesh network based on the 802.15.4 radio. Zigbee aims to enable products and services to work together through standardization and testing. Zigbee is designed with backward and forward compatibility in mind. Zigbee supports sleepy end devices, allowing for long-lived battery-powered applications. For routing mostly mains-powered devices like lightbulbs are being used. Zigbee networks can include more than a thousand devices at a time.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA ) oversights the Zigbee protocol development and certification program. Standards that are approved by the CSA are published and openly available. To use any of these published standards you must be a member of the alliance. The network layer is defined in the Zigbee PRO standard, and the Zigbee Cluster library defines the Application Layer. 

Network

Zigbee networkThe Zigbee Coordinator handles forming a network. This is a fixed role for the lifetime of the network. There is only one coordinator in each Zigbee network. It works as a trust-center and manages security settings as well as network authorization. In its additional function as the network manager, it monitors and corrects network issues. 

Zigbee routers are the core of the mesh topology. They provide routing services to connected devices. A router is the connection of its child nodes to the network. Zigbee routers are designed to have their radio continuously turned on. A router stores messages for its end devices. This means they are mostly mains connected because they never sleep. There is no limitation for the number of routers in a Zigbee network.

Zigbee end devices (ZED) are only connected to one other device, their router. A ZED can be a sleepy end device or a non-sleepy end device. Sleepy end devices are designed for low power operations. Most of the time the device will be in sleep mode. They poll their parent router to extract stored messages while awake. Non-sleepy end devices will be always powered, but still won’t rout or store messages for other devices.