Texas-based Silicon Labs has announced a slate of products that extend its multiprotocol interoperability-driven and secure IoT portfolio with Matter, Amazon Sidewalk, Wi-Sun and Wifi 6.

“By 2025, it’s estimated that there will be 27 billion connected IoT devices, roughly three or four devices per person on the planet,” said Silicon Labs CEO Matt Johnson. “By focusing our series-two product offerings and roadmap on connectivity, interoperability, power efficiency and security, Silicon Labs is positioned to be in each and every one of those devices.”

The series-two SoC family was developed under the premise that as the IoT matured, instead of looking for point products, the market would be looking for IoT platforms that combine hardware, software, security, tools and support. The prediction has proven true, and Silicon Labs has nearly doubled its IoT revenue since the first member of the series-two family debuted in 2019.

Now, Silicon Labs is building on that with four more products:

• Complete Matter development offerings providing support for Matter over wifi, Matter over Thread, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) commissioning, and Matter bridges to Zigbee and Z-Wave, all in advance of the expected release of Matter 1.0 this autumn.
• End-to-end development platform with 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 for Sidewalk device makers, designers and developers to get to market faster.
• A 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-GHz transmission range of up to 3km in dense urban environments with no data loss.
• The SiWx917 is designed to be the lowest power, longest battery life Wifi 6 and Bluetooth LE combination SoC in the industry.

Complete Matter development products should help device makers get a jump on Matter 1.0.

To accelerate the adoption of Matter, Silicon Labs is announcing a portfolio of hardware and software Matter products that provide complete, end-to-end development kits for all ecosystems and wireless protocols.

Announced and made generally available earlier this year, the central component of the platform is the 2.4GHz wireless MG24 SoC for Bluetooth and multiple-protocol operations, and it supports Matter over Thread as a single chip. The MG24 has an effective range of up to 200m indoors for OpenThread while enabling Bluetooth commissioning of new devices on the same chip. When the MG24 is combined with the low-power RS9116 wifi product, it enables development of Matter over Wifi 4 with an easy transition to Silicon Labs’ Wifi 6 single-chip Matter SoC in 2023.

All the Silicon Labs Matter products have IoT security with the firm’s Secure Vault.

The Unify SDK, a multi-protocol software development platform for Matter border routers, provides the tools to bridge Matter to other IoT platforms, including Zigbee and Z-Wave, and Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio and GSDK provide developers a single development environment for enabling Matter on wireless devices and seamlessly connecting them to their desired ecosystem.

Silicon Labs is also growing with Amazon Sidewalk, the community network powered by millions of everyday IoT devices found in communities and organisations, by offering an end-to-end development platform: the Pro Kit for Amazon Sidewalk.

This comprises low-power, high-performance wireless hardware for all Amazon Sidewalk protocols, including Bluetooth Low Energy, sub-GHz FSK and CSS, software SDKs, and security. It comes with a pre-flashed software image and AWS pre-registration, providing developers with a quick start to Amazon Sidewalk development, saving them days in setup.

Simplicity Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) for all Silicon Labs technologies, guides developers through the entire Amazon Sidewalk development journey from start to certifying final code into a guided, end-to-end process, increasing innovation and working efficiency.

“We’re excited to work with Silicon Labs to enable developers to build devices and experiences powered by the secure, ubiquitous, and always-on community network that we are building in Amazon Sidewalk,” said Tanuj Mohan, chief technology officer at Amazon Sidewalk. “The new Amazon Sidewalk Pro Kit from Silicon Labs streamlines the development process, so developers can deliver innovative products with Amazon Sidewalk’s enhanced connectivity at scale.”

Silicon Labs is working with Oxit and New Cosmos on the first gas alarm running on the Amazon Sidewalk platform. The connected DeNova Detect natural gas alarm can provide real-time gas leak alerts. With Oxit, an IoT design services company based in North Carolina, New Cosmos will be adding this alarm to its large portfolio. With Sidewalk, the alarm will benefit from reliable, long-range, low-bandwidth coverage, extended battery life and no network connectivity costs.

To help address the growing need for intelligent, connected devices in cities and other municipal environments, Silicon Labs is announcing the FG25 SoC and its complementary RF power amplifier, the EFF01.

Built to be the flagship SoC for LPWANs such as Wi-Sun and other proprietary sub-GHz protocols, the FG25 combines an Arm Cortex-M33 processor with internal memory. This enables FG25 deployments to scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes to let city planners and municipal engineers connect streetlights, cameras, weather stations, smart metering, utility transmission systems and more to enable data sharing and optimisation between city services, improving their efficiency, saving costs and offering more ways for citizens to interact with municipal services.

Launching with the FG25 SoC is the EFF01 RF front end module. Designed to amplify the power and transmission range of the FG25 SoC, the module doubles the effective range of the FG25, allowing it to operate with low data loss at a range of up to 3km in dense urban environments.

The secure low-power SiWx917 Wifi 6 and Bluetooth LE combination SoC is a single chip that is Matter ready, includes an integrated applications processor, and offers energy efficiency, making it suitable for battery-powered or energy-efficient IoT devices with always-on cloud connectivity.

In addition to SiWx917’s Wifi 6 support, it includes a dual-core architecture, a quad-thread ThreadArch processor for wireless connectivity, and a Cortex-M4F for user application processing. It also integrates embedded SRAM, flash, AI and ML accelerator, enhanced PSA level-two certifiable security engine, and power management subsystem in one package.