Silicon Labs is aggressively targeting the market for development solutions for its open smart home interconnection standard, ‘Matter.’

Silicon Labs, an IoT specialist, held a press conference at the Conrad Hotel in Seoul on the 21st to share the current status of Matter standards and introduce Silicon Labs’ Matter development solution strategy.

Silicon Labs stated, “Matter is one of the fastest-growing standards in history for manufacturers, and it is a new standard that simplifies IoT connectivity,” and “Silicon Labs is committed to leading the industry as a provider of a unified IoT platform including hardware, software, tools and certification for Matter development.”

Matter is designed to enable smart home devices and platforms to be interoperable. For example, Samsung products could only connect to Samsung's SmartThings platform, but with the Matter standard, they can connect to other platforms, including LG's apps.

Matter operates over IP, Wi-Fi, Thread, and Ethernet, simplifying all IoT connectivity and saving developers and consumers time and money across the ecosystem.

Thanks to the advantage of being an open source protocol, more than 280 global platforms and smart home device manufacturers are developing it together. The smart home global standards association CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) is led by Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, LG, etc. Matter 1.0 version was released in October last year, and currently more than 750 devices have received Matter certification.

Rob Alexander, senior product manager for Matter at Silicon Labs, explained, “Unlike existing standards like OCF, Matter defines the low-level user experience, and its greatest advantage is that it is an open-source protocol developed collaboratively by device manufacturers and cloud platform providers.”
As an IoT semiconductor company, Silicon Labs is expanding its matter development portfolio.

In January last year, the company announced its 2.4GHz wireless SoC family of products, the 'BG24' and 'MG24', and a new software toolkit. The product family integrates the industry’s first AI/ML accelerator and provides IoT security authentication via Silicon Labs’ Secure Vault™.

Silicon Labs also provides convenience to Matter developers. It has provided the 'Silicon Labs Pro Kit' for Amazon Sidewalk. Silicon Labs' Unify SDK helps connect Matter to other IoT platforms such as Zigbee. Simplicity Studio allows developers to connect their products to Matter and all major smart device ecosystems, regardless of protocol.

“As the highest promoter level within the CSA, Silicon Labs has been instrumental in driving the Matter standard and has also led related educational programs,” said Rob Alexander, senior product manager for Matter.

Regarding the future strategy for developing Matter standards, he said, “Silicon Labs has been maintaining collaborative relationships with many companies,” and “In particular, we have been collaborating with Samsung on the development of hubs such as the SmartThings Station, and we plan to support not only Thread, but also Zigbee and Z-Wave at the same time.”

Meanwhile, Matter 1.1 is expected to be released after April of this year, and is expected to add new technical elements to the standard and new devices such as home appliances, robots, and cameras. Silicon Labs announced plans to improve security and battery performance.