In his opening address at Silicon Labs' annual "Works With Developer" conference, CEO Matt Johnson explained: "By 2025, there are an estimated 27 billion connected IoT devices—roughly three to four devices per person on the planet. By focusing our Series 2 product offering and roadmap on connectivity, interoperability, energy efficiency, and security, Silicon Labs is positioning itself to be in every single one of those devices."
The Series 2 SoC family was developed under the premise that as the IoT matured, rather than seeking point solutions, the market would look for IoT platforms that combined hardware, software, security, tools, and support. This prediction has proven true, and Silicon Labs has nearly doubled its IoT revenue since the first member of the Series 2 family debuted in 2019. Today, Silicon Labs is building on the success of the Series 2 by expanding the family to include four new products:
- Complete Matter development solutions providing support for Matter over Wi-Fi, Matter over Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) deployment, and Matter to Zigbee and Z-Wave bridges—all ahead of the anticipated release of Matter 1.0 this fall.
- The first comprehensive development platform with full connectivity support for Amazon Sidewalk. The Silicon Labs Pro Kit for Amazon Sidewalk offers differentiated security with Secure Vault™, sub-gigahertz (GHz) and Bluetooth LE connectivity, and the software and tools to help Sidewalk device creators, designers, and developers get to market faster.
- A new flagship SoC and power amplifier for Wi-SUN, the FG25 SoC and EFF01 Front-End Module (FEM), respectively, which, when used together, are designed to provide a sub-gigahertz (GHz) transmission range of up to 3 kilometers in dense urban environments without data loss.
- Silicon Labs' first family of Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE SoCs, the SiWx917, which is designed to be the industry's lowest power and longest battery life combined Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE SoC.
One of the biggest drivers of the new era of IoT will be the Matter standard, which will provide a unifying application layer to bring together multiple smart home ecosystems. To accelerate the adoption of Matter and realize that vision, Silicon Labs today announced a portfolio of Matter hardware and software solutions that provide complete and comprehensive Matter development kits for all wireless ecosystems and protocols.
Announced and made publicly available earlier this year, the core component of the platform is Silicon Labs’ 2.4 GHz MG24 wireless SoC for Bluetooth and multi-protocol operations, supporting Matter over Thread as a single-chip solution. The MG24 has an effective range of up to 200 meters indoors for OpenThread, while also enabling Bluetooth deployment of new devices on the same chip. When the MG24 is combined with Silicon Labs’ ultra-low-power RS9116 Wi-Fi product, it enables the development of Matter over Wi-Fi 4 with a smooth transition to Silicon Labs’ single-chip Matter Wi-Fi 6 SoC in 2023.
All Silicon Labs Matter solutions deliver industry-leading IoT security with Silicon Labs Secure Vault™.
Silicon Labs' Unify SDK, the only multi-protocol software development platform for Matter Border Routers, provides the tools to link Matter with other IoT platforms, including Zigbee and Z-Wave, and Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio and GSDK provide developers with a single development environment to enable Matter on wireless devices and seamlessly connect them to their desired ecosystem.
So, regardless of the protocol—Bluetooth, Thread, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, or Z-Wave—Silicon Labs offers hardware, software, and development tools to enable developers to connect their products to Matter and other leading smart device ecosystems. The Matter-ready MG24 SoC, the RS9116 Wi-Fi SoC, the Unify multiprotocol SDK, Simplicity Studio, and the Gecko SDK are available today to help developers and designers begin building Matter-ready products using their preferred wireless protocol.
Silicon Labs announces Amazon Sidewalk, the community network powered by millions of everyday IoT devices found in communities and organizations, offering an end-to-end development platform: The Silicon Labs Pro Kit for Amazon Sidewalk.
The Silicon Labs Pro Kit for Amazon Sidewalk includes high-performance, low-power wireless hardware for all Sidewalk protocols, including Bluetooth Low Energy, FSK, and sub-GHz CSS, along with software SDKs and security. The Sidewalk Pro Kit comes with a pre-configured software image and AWS pre-registration, enabling developers to get started with Sidewalk development. Simplicity Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) for all Silicon Labs technologies, guides developers through the entire Sidewalk development journey, from inception to final code certification, in a guided, end-to-end process that maximizes innovation and work efficiency. By working with Silicon Labs, Amazon can better scale its Sidewalk development from concept to launch, saving IoT device manufacturers time and resources.
Silicon Labs is excited to partner with Oxit and New Cosmos USA Inc. on the first gas alarm running on the Silicon Labs Amazon Sidewalk platform: a connected DeNova Detect natural gas alarm that can provide real-time gas leak alerts. Together with Oxit, this new alarm will expand their portfolio of life-saving devices. With Amazon Sidewalk, the new alarm will benefit from reliable, long-range, low-bandwidth coverage, extended battery life, and no network connectivity costs.
Although anyone can develop an Amazon Sidewalk device, Amazon Sidewalk connectivity is currently only available to end consumers and endpoint devices in the United States. The Pro Kit is currently being tested, and general availability is planned for the second half of 2023.
To help address the growing need for smart, connected devices in cities and other municipal environments, Silicon Labs announces the new FG25 SoC and its complementary RF power amplifier, the EFF01.
Built to be the flagship SoC for low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) such as Wi-SUN and other proprietary sub-GHz protocols, the FG25 SoC combines a powerful ARM Cortex-M33 processor with the largest amount of internal memory of any SoC in Silicon Labs' portfolio. This large internal memory pool, combined with Silicon Labs' scalable Wi-SUN Field Area Network (FAN) Edge Router 1.1, enables FG25 deployments to scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes. Ideal for smart cities, this scalability will allow urban planners and municipal engineers to connect streetlights, cameras, weather stations, smart meters, utility transmission systems, etc., to enable data sharing and optimization between city services in order to improve their efficiency, save costs, and offer citizens more ways to interact with and get more value from municipal services.
Alongside the FG25 SoC, the EFF01 RF front-end module is also being introduced. Designed to amplify the power and transmission range of the FG25 SoC, the EFF01 FEM doubles the effective range of the FG25, enabling it to operate with minimal data loss at a range of up to 3 kilometers in dense urban environments. The FG25 and EFF01 are currently in customer trials and are expected to be generally available in Q4 2022 and Q2 2023, respectively.
Silicon Labs has also unveiled a new, secure, ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE combo SoC, the first Wi-Fi 6 solution in Silicon Labs' portfolio. The SiWx917 is a single-chip solution that is Matter-ready, includes an integrated application processor, and offers energy efficiency, making it ideal for battery-powered or low-power IoT devices with always-on cloud connectivity.
In addition to Wi-Fi 6 support for high performance in dense wireless environments, the SiWx917 features a dual-core architecture, a quad-thread ThreadArch® processor for wireless connectivity, and an ARM Cortex M4F for processing user applications. It also integrates embedded SRAM, FLASH memory, an AI/ML accelerator, an enhanced PSA Level 2 certified security engine, and a power management subsystem into a single 7x7 package. The SiWx917 is a fully integrated SoC designed to deliver exceptional computing power, faster machine learning processing, best-in-class security, ample memory to run stacks and wireless applications, and ultra-low power consumption for extended battery life. This can help users reduce development costs and device footprint, future-proof their applications, and accelerate time to market.
The SiWx917 is currently in the sampling phase and general availability is planned for early Q3 2023.
