The Zigbee Alliance has set up a working group to provide a European voice to its standards including its Connected Home over IP (Chip) project that aims to increase compatibility among smart home products.

Smart home device manufacturers and suppliers have joined forces to develop the Chip global standard that eases smart home implementations.

The alliance has set up the European interest group comprised of volunteer members with a shared focus on topics relating to Zigbee Alliance technologies and the European market. The goal is to facilitate conversations and collaboration among members to strengthen Zigbee standards globally.

Membership is open to all Zigbee Alliance participants and promoters. The group is chaired by Ulf Axelsson of Ikea Home Smart, and it should bring a European voice more formally into the standards work within the alliance.

“I am looking forward to collaborating on new levels with fellow alliance companies from an EU perspective, and fostering more regular interaction between our members that are interested and invested in the European residential or commercial IoT markets,” said Axelsson. “We are creating a structure to provide better visibility into the important developments happening across the Zigbee Alliance, and our Europe interest group provides an efficient avenue for more two-way dialogue and information exchange between regions, countries, companies and individuals all working towards the same technology goals.”

The group operates under the supervision of the Zigbee Alliance board of directors, and is tasked with providing input to the board regarding European technology needs and current events. It will collect, capture and share information about EU regulation and standards to the working groups within the alliance to aid in the development of global, open IoT standards.

The group will also share regular Chip project updates to EU member companies, facilitating discussions around Chip interoperability across Europe while providing insight to shape future endeavours for the European landscape. And it will coordinate and engage with alliance marketing teams to support EU events and speaker programmes.

“The formation of this European-centric group will take alliance-wide cooperation and communication to new levels, which is essential as our game-changing project Chip initiative comes into focus and to the market in early 2021, and we continue to drive openness and interoperability through our flagship Zigbee standards,” said Bruno Vulcano, R&D manager at Legrand and chairman of the Zigbee Alliance. “We’re fortunate to have Ulf of Ikea Home Smart leading this charge as he brings an ideal blend of technical experience, regional expertise and peer leadership to this role.”

German electronics firm Infineon Technologies helped define security features in Chip that are easy to integrate for manufacturers and easy to use for consumers.

“We are convinced that project Chip as an industry-wide standardisation effort has the power to boost smart home device manufacturing and deployment,” said Steve Hanna, senior principal at Infineon. “Hardware security is second to none when it comes to protecting users’ privacy and data security. We have brought in all our expertise to securely and easily connect domestic life with the internet.”

In the face of Covid-19, private homes have become the centre of working, educating, entertaining and even healthcare. As a result, there is greater demand for applications and functions ranging from home security to energy-efficient lighting or air conditioning. Aspects such as easy and secure in-home control and device set-up are consequently becoming fundamental for consumers’ buying decisions.

With Chip, consumers will experience a new degree of professionalism when adding a device into their home networks. From design to end of life, a device’s identity can now be stored and updated in hardware-based security. Hardware-based security can eliminate the use of insecure passwords, maintain device integrity through protected firmware updates and protect private data through data encryption.

As part of the Chip working group, Infineon has been involved in all major security teams, including those covering topics such as cryptographic primitives for encryption, device attestation and integrity, and the requirements for security certification of smart home devices.

Comparable to the TPM standard, which raised the bar for PC security, the Chip standard aims to help smart home device manufacturers significantly increase the level of security of their products while keeping costs controlled and avoiding needless complexity with easy-to-use hardware based security.