NEC, Skyley Networks and Uniband Electronic Corporation (UBEC) is introducing ZigBee development kits, including both software, hardware, and tools, that enable system developers to quickly and easily develop low power, wireless peer-to-peer mesh networks.

A key feature of NEC's new Zigbee™ kits is the availability of the Skyley software development kit (SDK) featuring an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI), which allows effortless network development, and includes a network sniffer, network viewer, node setting tool, and node monitor tool, for easy implementation of peer-to-peer mesh networks.

The hardware platform, consists of several evaluation boards based on All Flash™ microcontrollers by NEC, which offer the flexibility of flash-based programming and excellent power consumption levels, combined with UBEC's UZ2400 transceiver device, which integrates a wireless RF transceiver operating at 2.4 GHz, physical (PHY) layer baseband and media access control (MAC) layer architecture.

Developers will be able to choose 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit microcontroller platforms depending on their technology and cost preferences.

This is the key advantage presented by a multi-chip solution from a single vendor. Included with the development kit is the 802.15.4 MAC driver software and the Zigbee™ protocol stack.

Combined with the Skyely SDK developers can begin programming real applications straight out-of-the-box.

The kits will be certified for compliance with the Enhanced ZigBee™ Standard, to be unveiled by the ZigBee™ Alliance early this year.

The complete kits are available from NEC including all of the described components. The kits for the 8-bit 78K0, 16-bit 78K0R and 32-bit V850ES will be available in early 2007.