Silicon Labs kicked off its first ‘Works With’ virtual conference, September 9 – 10, 2020, focused on smart home technologies, with several new product announcements. These include the roll out of a new small Bluetooth system-in-package (SiP) module, the BGM220S, and a major upgrade to its Simplicity Studio integrated developer environment (IDE). These new products are in addition to the recently announced third-party security certifications for its EFR32MG21B multiprotocol wireless system-on-chips (SoCs), its first products with the company’s new suite of security features called Secure Vault for IoT devices.
Silicon Lab’s Work With virtual smart home conference is focused on helping smart home developers get to market quickly by connecting the IoT developer community with smart home platform and protocol providers. Speakers work at companies like Amazon, Comcast, Google, Tuya, and Silicon Labs that design and deliver certified IoT solutions that “work with” any smart home ecosystem or wireless protocol.
In the case of Silicon Labs, that means connecting IoT developers with devices that work with multiple smart home ecosystems and across 100 wireless protocols, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread. Some of the most popular ecosystems include Amazon, Apple, Comcast Xfinity, Google, Ring, and Tuya.
“One of the key foundational points is that the smart home has never been more relevant or needed then it is right now,” said Matt Johnson, senior vice president of IoT at Silicon Labs, during a conference presentation. “A lot of people are spending more time at home than ever before, and the IoT can make a big difference.”
“As an industry, we find ourselves at a unique moment in time where everyone sees the opportunity, and it’s not debated anymore, but at the same time there’s a still a lot of challenges in the IoT space to achieve its potential and impact that we all know and want to see happen,” he added. “And that is why we’re really excited to be hosting this event – to get our industry together and really work in earnest on accelerating through these issues, and getting things to work together better, faster, and easier than they did before.”
Bluetooth Low Energy
Silicon Labs has been leveraging its wireless expertise to establish its leadership in the Bluetooth Low Energy space. In January, the company launched its BG22 Secure Bluetooth 5.2 SoCs, which Johnson said is on track to be the company’s most successful product.
The reason is the great combination of power consumption, price point, performance, and security all intertwined, and that is just one of the many Bluetooth products coming out, he said.
The company offers a range of Bluetooth Low Energy SoCs and modules. While the SoCs target IoT device makers that need greater flexibility with customizable software and RF design options, SiP modules target device makers that need a small form factor, pre-certified Bluetooth Low Energy with little or no RF design or engineering required, said the company. Both solutions support multiprotocol connectivity for applications such as gateways, hubs, and smart lighting.
Bluetooth Low Energy is the fastest growing Bluetooth radio with a projected 26% compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2024, according to Bluetooth SIG’s 2020 Bluetooth Market Update.
Silicon Labs BGM220
The company expanded its Bluetooth Low Energy portfolio with today’s launch of the BGM220S. Claimed as the industry’s smallest Bluetooth SiP, measuring 6 × 6 mm, the BGM220S adds turnkey Bluetooth connectivity to very small products, with a low cost and five- to ten-year battery life on a single coin cell. It also delivers turnkey pre-certification including for CE and FCC as well as Bluetooth qualifications, speeding up time to market.
Johnson said the new SiP offers the same underlying SoC but it’s in a module that is highly integrated, including the antenna and passives. Everything is done – layout, RF performance, and certifications – so customers can move a lot faster with their designs, said Johnson.
“We’re maximizing the integration so from a customer perspective, they don’t have to worry about a lot of the elements that are typically challenging with a wireless development design,” he added. “We see increasingly customers wanting to rely on modules, especially new entrants into the smart home space or the IoT space.”
The company also introduced a slightly larger PCB variant, the BGM220P, which is optimized for wireless performance with a better link budget for greater range. The BGM220S and BGM220P are among the first Bluetooth modules to support Bluetooth Direction Finding, while delivering up to ten-year battery life from a single coin cell, said the company.
Silicon Lab’s Bluetooth Low Energy line incorporates the company’s new Secure Vault suite of advanced security features that include hardware and software protection for IoT devices.
Other Bluetooth Low Energy products include the Series 2 platform SoCs, the EFR32MG21 and EFR32BG21, that target line-powered devices, and the highly integrated, pre-certified MGM210x and BGM210x Series 2 modules that support Zigbee, Thread, and Bluetooth mesh protocols; Bluetooth Low Energy, and multi-protocol connectivity. The EFR32MG21 SoCs support multiprotocol, Zigbee, Thread, and Bluetooth, and the EFR32BG21 SoCs are enabled for Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth mesh.
The company also offers network co-processor (NCPs), which offer the fastest time to market, said the company. The NCPs allow device makers to easily add turnkey security with pre-certified Bluetooth functionality to their existing microcontrollers (MCUs) with embedded security features.
Silicon Labs is planning to expand its NCP product family with new Bluetooth Xpress BGX220 pre-certified PCB and SiP modules. Launching by the end of September, the BGX220 UART to Bluetooth Low Energy bridge modules provide a certified hardware platform that also streamlines code development by implementing the stack up to a simple API that can be used with an external microcontroller.
But the company is not stopping with Bluetooth. Z-Wave will be its next target.
The Z-Wave Alliance, a standards organization for the Z-Wave Alliance recently announced the new Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) specification to provide an extended wireless range beyond the interior of the home to wireless devices such as door locks, garage door sensors, and gate access solutions.
Z-Wave long range offers 4× the range, 10× node scalability, said Johnson, “so that’s taking you up to 2,000 nodes” on a single smart home network.
“It’s still supporting a 10-year coin cell battery life and 100% Z-Wave backwards compatibility. So what that means is if you have an existing network, it could work with long-range products and if you have an existing product, we could update that product to support long range,” he added. “For me, this is just a fantastic example of taking something that was already strong and making it even stronger by applying our expertise in the wireless space.”
IDE upgrade
Also announced at the smart home virtual conference is Silicon Labs’ major upgrade to its Simplicity Studio IDE. The latest version, Simplicity Studio 5, now offers the same access and developer experience, security configuration, and code portability across a wide range of wireless protocols, all within a central web-style user interface. The drive behind the new update was to simplify the development of wireless SoCs and modules, MCUs, and other embedded products for IoT devices, said the company.
Addressing the key pain points of developers including time to market, certifications, and code reuse, the new update offers an improved user interface, optimized workflows, a debug and analysis capability, faster performance, advanced security with Secure Vault, and multiprotocol support. These new features are designed to help developers speed up the development, prototyping, and deployment of connected devices.
“It’s not enough to have all these technologies,” said Johnson. “You need to be able to make it easy for our customers to use and develop these technologies and have them all work seamlessly together.
“We feel the pain and we know the industry’s not where it needs to be, so we’ve been working on this for years to make it easier, and our development tools or IDE is one piece of that and it’s a big piece,” he added.
Johnson said with Simplicity Studio 5, the company was focused specifically on improving the developer experience. It supports all the things we’ve talked about – support for OpenThread and multiprotocols and state-of-the-art security, and it’s also about the experience, so it is faster and has developer-focused workflows, he added.
The upgrade also includes self-service support by building in technical resources such as user guides, reference manuals, schematics, APIs, etc.
“There are very few developers that don’t request support at some point in time and we see that as a critical part of our role. That’ll never go away but this will allow people to find what they want much faster on their own and much more intuitively,” Johnson said.
New certifications
Last week, Silicon Labs announced that its new EFR32MG21B multiprotocol wireless SoCs with Secure Vault earned Arm PSA Level 2 certification. This is an assurance framework co-founded by Arm that helps IoT security standardization and removes security as a barrier to time-to-market, said the company. The EFR32MG21B is the first radio to achieve the Arm PSA Level 2 Certification.
In August 2020, the EFR32xG22 Wireless Gecko Series 2 development kit earned ioXt SmartCert security certification through the ioXt Alliance, which is focused on advancing IoT security. The certification program evaluates a device against eight ioXt pledge principles. In addition, since the ioXt Alliance allows for certification ‘inheritance,’ the Silicon Labs ioXt certifications can be used by any device maker using the xG22 and xG21B devices to reduce their own device-level ioXt certification time.
Advertisement
Learn more about Silicon Labs
