The IEEE 802.15.4 IC market will grow to over $1.1 billion in 2016, up from just $90 million in 2010, a new report said.
The ABI Research report also said Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is still a key adoption market and there is significant impetus behind the continuation of this market.
Some concerns have been raised around mass deployments ahead of IP support and the planned ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0, but recent announcements by ZigBee to migrate its portfolio of profiles into IP-based solutions should allay such concerns, the report said.
The home entertainment market has also seen significant uptake, helping to drive up shipment numbers over the past twelve months or so with the development and adoption of ZigBee RF4CE, the report added.
Initial products leveraging 802.15.4 are still led by P2P deployments using proprietary software stacks but the transition to standard software implementations is well underway and the market positions of both approaches will be reversed by the end of the forecast period with standardized implementations dominating. In addition, P2P deployments also dominate usage, but that too will shift over to mesh network configurations during the forecast period.
Chipset shipment will continue to grow at expanding rates as the 802.15.4 technology reaches a level of deployment maturity and price point that enables WSN to extend more broadly across markets, not just in AMI and home entertainment, where the bulk of the market is currently, but also across the building automation and healthcare sectors around the world. New markets are also emerging, such as traffic monitoring, smart parking, and flood alert systems within the smart city concept.