Atmel® Corporation, a leader in microcontroller (MCU) and touch solutions, announced that it is among the first companies to achieve ZigBee® Certified product status using ZigBee Light Link™ Certification, a new industry standard to accelerate the design of easy-to-use consumer lighting and control products that will give consumers the ability to wirelessly control their LED fixtures, light bulbs, timers, remotes and switches within their homes.
 
With this reference implementation for ZigBee Light Link, Atmel has achieved ‘golden unit’ status, making it the benchmark against which future ZigBee Certified products designed to this standard will be tested. Widely known for its superior RF performance and extremely low power consumption, the ATmega128RFA1 wireless MCU serves as an ideal hardware platform for the ZigBee Light Link Golden Units.

Designed to allow engineers the ability to manage multiple lighting devices on a single network, this reference design integrates Atmel’s ATmega128RFA1 wireless MCUs on a RF4CE-EK evaluation kit with ZigBee Light Link profile software stack ported onto the system. The ATmega128RFA1 offers the industry’s lowest power consumption at 12.5mA in active receive mode, combined with receiver sensitivity at -101dBm. The ZigBee Light Link reference implementation can also be used seamlessly with Atmel’s LED drivers for color-mixing, system management and advanced dimming in commercial, industrial or architectural solid-state lighting applications.

ZigBee Light Link provides a global standard for interoperable and very easy-to-use consumer lighting and control products. In addition, the standard allows consumers to change lighting remotely to reflect ambiance, task or season, all while managing energy use and making their homes greener. There are a number of industry advantages, including single platform control of multiple devices, including lamps, switches, dimmers, timers and remote controls. The standard also enables the lighting control platforms to control up to 255 devices.