Standardizing Smart Home Interconnectivity with 'Matter'

The electronics industry delivers an incredible stream of innovative smart home products, but has been slow to provide consumers with the ability to make them all work together seamlessly out of the box.

Many of the most prominent platform providers, device makers, and semiconductor companies are coalescing around the Matter connectivity standard, which they hope will finally bridge the many gaps that have frustrated product designers for years.

Matter aims to overcome the smart home interconnectivity issues that plagued earlier standards by allowing devices to be controlled by multiple ecosystems. Silicon Labs is helping drive this transition with core silicon solutions, development tools, and services needed to design, build, certify, and deploy Matter-compliant products.

The smart home landscape—and broader IoT environment—has been shaped by various interconnectivity standards, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. These include Zigbee’s need for proprietary hubs or embedded controllers, the power consumption requirements of Wi-Fi that is impractical for battery-operated devices, and Bluetooth Low Energy’s (BLE) lack of range and responsiveness required for larger, always-on environments. Thread, an IP-based mesh protocol optimized for low power and reliability, works well for small, always-on devices, but has low bandwidth and requires an application-layer stack for cross-vendor interoperability.

Platform-specific ecosystems like Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings present a fragmented developer environment. Matter was introduced in 2022 to foster interoperability, local control, and enable devices to simultaneously connect to and be controlled by multiple ecosystems and platforms.

Matter is an application-level protocol that runs over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Thread, and uses BLE for device commissioning and setup. It encompasses elements of Google Weave, Apple HomeKit, and Zigbee, under the auspices of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the rebranded and scope-expanded evolution of the Zigbee Alliance.

The CSA membership of more than 700 includes platform and device vendors Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung; retailers such as Home Depot and IKEA; numerous device manufacturers; and silicon and software vendors like Silicon Labs.

The CSA provides developers with out-of-the-box core connectivity, a Matter unified open-source software development kit, standardized device models, and built-in security that includes encrypted communications and secure onboarding. This enables the development of a single product version that can operate across multiple ecosystems, saving time and costs associated with prototyping, while offering plug-and-play compatibility out of the box.

With Matter, a border router connects low-power Thread mesh networks to other IP networks such as Wi-Fi and Ethernet, without needing to translate messages between incompatible protocols, as is typical of traditional IoT gateways.

Silicon Labs plays it forward

Silicon Labs is a key player in the CSA and one of the leading contributors to its GitHub repository. The company brings with it expertise in developing silicon and development tools for wireless protocols, including Thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Bringing those capabilities forward to Matter, Silicon Labs introduced its xG26 family (Figure 1), a range of wireless system-on-chips (SoCs) and microcontrollers (MCUs) based on a common platform.

Figure 1: The xG26 product family entails three groups of devices, headed by the concurrent multiprotocol MG26. (Image source: Silicon Labs)

Built on an ARM Cortex-M33 core and supporting up to 3 MB of flash and 512 kB of RAM, xG26 chips deliver processing power to handle complex applications, with integrated AI/ML hardware acceleration for enabling responsive, efficient edge computing.  

The EFR32MG26 (MG26) SoCs enable mesh IoT wireless connectivity using Matter, OpenThread, and Zigbee protocols. They feature up to 2,300 KB flash and 512 KB RAM, double what was available on previous generation devices. They provide solid performance and hardware-level security for smart home, lighting, and building automation products, and can run on ecosystems like Google Home or Apple HomeKit, with the ability to adapt to emerging use cases.

The xG26 family also includes the EFR32BG26 (BG26) SoCs optimized for Bluetooth LE and mesh, suitable for applications like smart lighting and portable medical devices, and the general purpose EFM32PG26 (PG26) MCU range designed for applications that require robust processing without wireless connectivity. In addition, there are several evaluation boards, including the XG26-EK2709A Explorer Kit (Figure 2), a small form factor development and evaluation platform for rapid prototyping of IoT applications for 2.4 GHz wireless protocols, including Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth mesh, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter.

Figure 2: The XG26-EK2709A features a USB interface, on-board SEGGER J-Link debugger, two user-LEDs, and two buttons, with support for hardware add-on boards via a mikroBUS socket and a Qwiic connector. (Image source: Silicon Labs)

Conclusion

The Silicon Labs xG26 family provides ample processing power, memory, and built-in features like machine learning acceleration and advanced security to support a wide range of applications for low-power, always-on devices that need to be secure, responsive, and compatible with emerging standards. Whether designing concurrent multiprotocol devices, Bluetooth-only products, or non-wireless embedded systems, the xG26 family covers the spectrum of design needs with a shared architecture that spans processing power, memory configuration, security features, and development tools.