Zigbee standards to be used in more than 80% of 802.15.4 chipset shipments by 2020

July 1, 2015
Zigbee's share of the IEEE 802.15.4 market is set the sky rocket in the coming years.

ZigBee is continuing to increase its already sizable share of the IEEE 802.15.4 and smart home markets, according to ON World. In 2020, ZigBee standards will be used in 8 out of 10 of the 802.15.4 chipset shipments.

“ZigBee has always provided flexibility for developers and now ZigBee is rapidly becoming the consumer technology of choice for emerging smart home products,” said Mareca Hatler, ON World’s research director.  “This trend is expected to accelerate as ZigBee 3.0 unifies its application profiles and the Thread Group provides a standards based IP addressable wireless mesh network layer.”

Last year, annual Zigbee/802.15.14 shipments nearly doubled, and are expected to increase 550% over the next five years. The Thread specification that is scheduled to be released this month is said to simplify and streamline the creation of smart home IoT products and services. 

ZigBee is facing intensifying competition from low power variants of WiFi and Bluetooth Smart that are gaining tremendous momentum currently from the mobile, IT and consumer electronics industries. However, ON World  still projects that annual wireless sensor network chipset shipments will exceed 2 billion in the next five years.