Silicon Labs is working with Arduino to enable seamless development of Matter over Thread applications for Arduino’s 33 million-strong developer community.

Developed in collaboration with Silicon Labs, Arduino’s first-ever Matter software libraries are available on both the xG24 Explorer Kit from Silicon Labs and the xG24-based SparkFun Thing Plus Matter MGM240P development board.

“Arduino’s simplicity, ease of use and powerful development environment is what makes them so appealing to their community of over 33 million users, whether they be makers just getting started, or pros with a wealth of development experience,” said Rob Shane, vice president at Silicon Labs. “By combining Arduino’s software libraries with Silicon Labs-based hardware, developers get the best of both worlds with our leading security, energy efficiency and processing power for Matter.”

Code samples, reference designs, documentation and more are now live in the Arduino Core for Silicon Labs Devices GitHub page (github.com/SiliconLabs/arduino).

Arduino is an ecosystem that offers hardware products, software and cloud services accessible to all. In line with the open-source nature of the entire project, the Arduino programming language – used in the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) – has grown and evolved over the years thanks to the input of its engaged community and user base, who routinely contribute to the platform’s ability to meet the changing needs of the embedded computing market.

Its intuitive interface and ease of use have made it a favourite for anyone from students taking their first steps in coding to enterprise developers. This partnership marks a crucial step in this direction, lowering barriers to entry to make developing a Matter device easier.

“Empowering innovators has always been at the core of Arduino’s mission, and our collaboration with Silicon Labs takes that commitment to new heights,” said Fabio Violante, CEO of Arduino. “This partnership represents a significant stride in democratising the development of Matter applications, for our community and beyond. By integrating Arduino’s simplicity and powerful development environment with Silicon Labs’ cutting-edge hardware capabilities, we are providing users with a unique blend of accessibility and advanced features. Together with Silicon Labs, we are excited to pave the way for the next wave of innovation in the IoT landscape.”

Indeed, Arduino’s shared software resources are powerful, with a wide range of pre-compiled libraries to help developers get their devices up and running quickly. In internal testing, Silicon Labs engineers were able to set up a new board flashed as a Matter device and ready to be commissioned into a new network in under two minutes. This represents a step forward in making Matter development more accessible, simpler and faster.

A complete platform for Matter development needs hardware and software, and as phase two of the collaboration, the two companies are co-developing a member of the Arduino Nano family of development boards for small form factor devices. The new member of the family will incorporate the MGM240 module (www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg24-series-2-modules) from Silicon Labs.

Based on the MG24 SoC, the module provides wireless connectivity using Matter, Thread and Bluetooth protocols. With features such as an Arm Cortex-M33, 10dBm output power, low current consumption and PSA Certification level-three security, Arduino developers can create robust, fast and energy-efficient applications while securing end-user privacy. The memory, of up to 1536kbyte of flash and 256kbyte of RAM, and 32 GPIOs, provide the capacity and expandability needed for Matter.

This partnership is part of Silicon Labs’ ongoing goal to make IoT development as user-friendly and expedient as possible. To accomplish this, Silicon Labs is not only partnering with development tool providers, such as Arduino, but is also evolving its own development tools. These will take a step forward with the release of Simplicity Studio 6 (www.silabs.com/developers/simplicity-studio) later this year. This version of Simplicity Studio will let developers integrate their own preferred IDE, meaning they can programme their devices within their preferred environment, using their preferred language.