Zigbee is a wireless standard that uses the 2.4 GHz band, and is widely used mainly in smart homes in North America and smart meters (*1) in Europe. One of the features is that the data rate is kept low to achieve low power consumption, and robustness that allows the construction of a mesh network is also one of the features.

If you make a device that conforms to the Zigbee specification, it can coexist on the same network with devices made by other companies, so from the perspective of building a smart home, it is a wireless standard that is very user-friendly, but it did not spread well in Japan. .

At the end of 2017, Amazon launched the Amazon Echo Plus, an AI speaker equipped with a Zigbee hub as standard. (For reference: The AI speaker "Amazon Echo Plus" supports Zigbee, but can Silicon Labs' Zigbee products be connected?) In Japan as well, it is expected that the number of private homes with Zigbee networks will increase in the future. . Against this backdrop, an increasing number of manufacturers are starting to develop and study Zigbee-equipped devices.

*1: In Europe, 868MHz is also used in addition to 2.4GHz.