Airbee, Link Plus partner to develop long-range wireless technologies

Columbia, MD—Airbee Wireless and Link Plus Corp. have formed a strategic partnership for co-developing new products around the emerging ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) wireless standard. Both firms are located in the Washington, DC, area.

The two partners plan to integrate a bundle of secure, high-performance RF wireless technologies, which will be implemented as a series of low-cost system bundles and ultimately as system-on-a-chip (SOC) offerings. These products will combine Link Plus’ AWICS radios and microprocessor-based hardware and Airbee’s UltraLite embedded software protocols.

‘Our patented AWICS wireless hardware platform provides a long-range, real-time radio capability that can be applied to several large and important emerging markets, including automatic meter reading, home automation, point-of-sale, and automotive security,’ says Dr. Jonathan Gluckman, Link Plus’ executive VP and COO. ‘When combined with Airbee’s proprietary software stack, we expect to be able to reduce system size and power to produce highly efficient modules for these and other industries.’

Gene Sharer, Airbee’s COO, adds that, ‘Porting Airbee software to Link Plus’ proven microprocessor environments accelerates time-to-market for many applications, while using approved ZigBee specifications leverages Airbee’s investment in protocols emerging from the ZigBee Alliance. One of our major contributions to the strategic partnership is our long-term expertise in developing a complete package of application program interfaces (APIs). Application notes to support these APIs are critical tools when porting our technology software bundles from one platform to another.’

The two executives also expect their co-licensing agreement to reduce time to market significantly for their respective product development programs. They add that the relationship is expected to generate

Control Engineering Daily News Desk
Jim Montague, news editor
jmontague@reedbusiness.com

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