Ember Announces Strategic Agreement with CIA’s Technology Incubator

October 20, 2005

Ember Corporation today announced a strategic investment and development agreement with In-Q-Tel, a private venture group established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Ember, a leading ZigBee™ wireless semiconductor systems company, will use the investment to develop wireless sensor, monitoring and control technology.

ZigBee is a wireless, standards-based radio technology designed for low-power networking applications including home control and awareness, building automation, medical monitoring, industrial automation, asset management and homeland security.

Ember develops tiny, low power ZigBee systems for creating wireless sensing and control networks that automatically configure and heal themselves, and work for years on very little power. Ember’s ZigBee system is already being used in a variety of consumer and industrial applications, such as home automation and control, automatic meter reading and cold chain monitoring. The government has a variety of low-power, low-data-rate applications that will benefit from Ember’s proven commercial platform.

“Ember is the market leader with a mature platform that has been successfully deployed in a variety of applications around the world” said Gilman Louie, president and CEO of In-Q-Tel. “We believe their technology has great potential to improve the security and efficiency of government and defense operations.”

Ember’s ZigBee leadership is reflected in its long involvement and contributions in helping to forge the standard. Ember is a promoter of the ZigBee Alliance, with its employees serving in strategic and technical roles in the organization. Ember’s semiconductor system is also the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for evaluating IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee products for interoperability.

About Ember Corporation
Ember enables communication among embedded microcontrollers with standards-based wireless mesh networking semiconductors and software. Ember helps its customers to automate home appliances, lower energy consumption in buildings, keep borders and infrastructure secure, and control industrial processes, just to name four of the many diverse applications being developed by Ember’s more than 100 customers. Spun out of MIT in 2001, Ember is headquartered in Boston and has its radio development center in Cambridge, England and distributors worldwide. Ember is a lead member of the ZigBee Alliance, and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more information, please visit www.ember.com.