Zigbee products will hit the market this year and a lack of interoperability testing of the technology will not be a problem, according to Freescale Semiconductor.

“This is the first year that we will see actual product,” Mark Williams, technical staff at Freescale Semiconductor, told Electronics Weekly at the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium in San Diego. “Right now we’ve not seen a lot of interest in interoperability. It’s mainly for proprietary applications.”

“We’re all working from an open standard,” said Williams, adding that the industry is using “public and private profiles” to control the operation of the low cost, short range technology. The profiles set out the operation of Zigbee for applications like lighting systems or automatic meter reading to ensure interoperability.

There is already a multimillion unit automatic meter reading trial deployment of Zigbee taking place in Scandinavia and Williams expects other deployments.

“We have hundreds of design opportunities in place at the moment,” said Williams. “Home automation products will be on the market this year.”

www.freescale.com/zigbee