Airbee-ZNS2004™, the ZigBee™-ready protocol stack software is designed for maximum portability among various 802.15.4 radios and a host of microcontrollers. Airbee-ZNS has been developed to achieve maximum portability and adaptability and is currently available on Texas Instruments, Atmel, and Freescale microcontrollers as well as Freescale, ZMD, Chipcon 802.15.4 radios. The possibility of developing a full ZigBee stack or parts of it on new or modified hardware platform offers a phenomenal advantage to ZigBee application developers, ZigBee hardware developers, tool developers, and manufacturers of ZigBee compatible products. Such versatility of the protocol stack also enables custom implementations.
In a typical embedded software design and implementation, the extent of portability is limited by factors such as unclear interactions between the radio and the medium, hardware dependent optimization needs, the ordering of bytes in a multi-byte packet, and numerous other details with little or no specifications.
Airbee-ZNS implementation is designed around these limitations as shown in the graphic above. Airbee-ZNS is built to address complete portability across all microcontrollers and 802.15.4 radio combinations. Each layer in the ZigBee standard has its own Application Programming Interface (API). At the lowest level, Airbee-ZNS PHY layer API’s are segregated into three parts to address the target platform issues and portability. The three parts are the microcontroller API, 802.15.4 radio API, and PHY API.
