The electronics industry continues to introduce various innovative smart home products, but manufacturers have been slow to achieve seamless collaboration for these products out of the box.
Several well-known platform providers, equipment manufacturers, and semiconductor companies are collaborating around the Matter connectivity standard, hoping that this standard can ultimately bridge the many gaps that have plagued product designers for many years.
The Matter standard aims to break through the barriers to smart home connectivity that plagued early standards by allowing devices to be controlled by multiple smart ecosystems. Silicon Labs is driving the development, production, certification, and deployment of Matter compatible standard products in the industry by providing core silicon solutions, development tools, and supporting services.
The pattern of smart homes, namely the broader scope of the Internet of Things, has been shaped by various interconnection standards, but each standard has its own advantages and disadvantages. Specifically, Zigbee relies on dedicated gateways or embedded controllers; The power consumption requirements of Wi Fi are unrealistic for battery powered devices; However, low-power Bluetooth (BLE) technology has limitations in transmission distance and response speed in large-scale constant online scenarios. Thread is an IP based mesh protocol optimized for low power consumption and reliability, suitable for small devices with constant online connectivity, but with low bandwidth and requiring an application layer stack for cross vendor interoperability.
Platforms specific ecosystems such as Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings have led to fragmented developer environments. The Matter protocol was launched in 2022 with the aim of promoting interoperability between devices, local control, and enabling devices to simultaneously access and be controlled by multiple ecosystems and platforms.
Matter is an application level protocol that can run on Wi Fi, Ethernet, and Thread, and uses BLE for device debugging and setup. The Matter protocol integrates technological elements from Google Weave, Apple HomeKit, and Zigbee, developed under the sponsorship of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) - a brand new form of the Zigbee Alliance that has undergone rebranding and expansion.
CSA has over 700 members, including platform and device suppliers Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, retailers such as Home Depot and IKEA, numerous device manufacturers, as well as chip and software suppliers such as Silicon Labs.
CSA can provide developers with out of the box core connectivity capabilities, including Matter's unified open-source software development suite, standardized device models, and a built-in security protection system that integrates encrypted communication and secure network access functions. This enables developers to create a single product version that can span multiple ecosystems, saving time and costs related to prototyping while also being out of the box and plug and play.
Through the Matter protocol, border routers can connect low-power Thread mesh networks to IP networks such as Wi Fi or Ethernet, eliminating the message conversion process between incompatible protocols in traditional IoT gateways.
Silicon Labs will continue to move forward
Silicon Labs is a core member of CSA and one of the main developers of the alliance's GitHub open source repository. The company has a deep foundation in chip development and supporting development tools in the field of wireless communication protocols, covering wireless technologies such as Thread, Wi Fi, and Bluetooth.
In order to introduce these features into Matter, Silicon Labs has launched the xG26 series devices (Figure 1), which are wireless system on chip (SoC) and microcontroller (MCU) based on a universal platform.
Figure 1: The xG26 series products include three sets of devices, led by the concurrent multi protocol MG26. (Image source: Silicon Labs)
Based on the ARM Cortex-M33 core, it builds and supports up to 3 MB of flash memory and 512 kB of RAM. The xG26 chip can handle complex applications, and integrates AI/ML hardware acceleration functions, which can achieve rapid and efficient edge computing.
Through Matter, OpenThread, and Zigbee protocols, the EFR32MG26 (MG26) SoC can achieve wireless connectivity for mesh IoT. This device has up to 2300 KB of flash memory and 512 KB of RAM, which is twice as much as the previous generation product. This device provides reliable performance and hardware level security for smart home, lighting, and building automation products, and can run in ecosystems such as Google Home or Apple HomeKit, adapting to various emerging use cases.
The xG26 series also includes the EFR32BG26 (BG26) SoC optimized for low-power Bluetooth and mesh networks, as well as the general-purpose EFM32PG26 (PG26) MCU series. The former is suitable for applications such as smart lighting and portable medical devices, while the latter is designed for applications that require powerful processing power without wireless connectivity. In addition, there are several evaluation boards, including the XG26-EK2709A Explorer kit (Figure 2). This is a small development and evaluation platform for rapidly developing IoT application prototypes for 2.4 GHz wireless protocols, including low-power Bluetooth, Bluetooth mesh networks, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter.