The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly the Zigbee Alliance, is a group of companies that maintain and publish the

Zigbee Zigbee is an IEEE 802.15.4-based specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols used to create personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, medical device data collection, and oth ...

and

Matter In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic pa ...

standard, along with several others.

Membership

Over the years, the Alliance's membership has grown to over 500 companies, including the likes of

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

Comcast Comcast Corporation, formerly known as Comcast Holdings,Before the AT&T Broadband, AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, not th ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

Ikea IKEA ( , ) is a Multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in Sweden that designs and sells , household goods, and various related services. IKEA is owned and operated by a series of not-for-profit an ...

, and Samsung SmartThings.

Membership levels

The CSA has four levels of membership: associate, adopter, participant, and promoter. Associate membership is free. However, it only allows the member to white-label certified products as well as use Alliance Certification trademarks for a per product and annual fee. Adopter members are allowed access to completed CSA specifications and standards, like Zigbee. They also gain access to Alliance technology logos and trademarks for certified products Participant members have voting rights in Alliance Working Group teams and play a role in Zigbee or Matter development alongside access to Alliance technical working groups, and have early access to specifications and standards for product development. Promoter members enjoy all other member level benefits as well as help lead with final approval on all standards developed by the Alliance by holding a seat on the Alliance Board of Directors. They pay an unknown one-time initiation fee as well as an annual membership fee of $105,000. As of 2024 there are 33 promoter members of the CSA who facilitate the promotion and advertisement of CSA developed standards, primarily Matter. The Alliance also has two regional member groups in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

and

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

: The Connectivity Standards Alliance Member Group China (CMGC) is formed by members with a focus on promoting Alliance technologies in the China market. The Europe Interest Group (EIG) consisting of 98+ member companies and 216 individual members has a focus on the European market.

Alliance

The name Zigbee is a registered

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

of this group, and is not a single technical standard. The organization publishes application profiles that allow multiple original equipment manufacturer (OEM) vendors to create interoperable products. The relationship between IEEE 802.15.4 and Zigbee is similar to that between

IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer com ...

and the

Wi-Fi Alliance The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit organization that owns the Wi-Fi trademark. Manufacturers may use the trademark to brand products certified for Wi-Fi interoperability. It is based in Austin, Texas. History Early IEEE 802.11, 802.11 product ...

. The requirements for membership in the Alliance cause problems for free-software developers working with Zigbee because the annual fee conflicts with the

GNU General Public Licence The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft, ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was th ...

. The requirements for developers to join the CSA also conflict with most other free-software licenses. The CSA board of directors has been asked to make their license compatible with GPL, but refused.

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

has GPL-licensed implementations. However, the main Matter SDK is licensed under Apache 2.0 alongside the Typescript and Rust implementations. On May 11, 2021, the Zigbee Alliance announced its rebranding to ''Connectivity Standards Alliance''.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://csa-iot.org/ Standards organizations in the United States Organizations established in 2002 Organizations based in California