Skyworks, Ember partner on Zigbee front-end modules

"Skyworks' partnership with Ember accelerates our efforts in the energy management industry by more than doubling our addressable market for front-end modules," said Stan Swearingen, Skyworks VP and general manager of linear products. "By integrating our front-end modules with Ember's Zigbee silicon, we are offering our customers a high performance plug-and-play solution that is truly unmatched worldwide.

"Ember and Skyworks are teaming together to create the industry's first Zigbee FEM that dramatically reduces component size, cost and power consumption," said Bob Gohn, Ember's VP of marketing. "We are making it easier than ever for our customers to deliver exceptional performance in their products across a wide range of Zigbee-based applications."

West Technology Research Solutions is forecasting the Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 market to grow at an annual rate of over 117 percent—from approximately 8.4 million units shipped in 2007 to as many as 516 million in 2012.