By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
This week Silicon Labs released the world’s first Wi-Fi 6 chipset “designed for IoT from the ground up,” the company said. IoT device manufacturers can now enjoy the benefits of Wi-Fi 6, ultra-low power consumption, and Silicon Labs’ popular development environment for fast time-to-market, all in one solution. The SiWx917 platform family also features single-chip Matter over Wi-Fi capabilities.
How do you strike the sweet spot in a wireless IoT market with tens of thousands of manufacturers, even more developers, and a nearly endless list of IoT use cases spanning multiple industries? This week Silicon Labs released their bid for Wi-Fi IoT leadership: The new SiWx917 platform features pretty much everything any IoT developer would want including one critical feature: Ultra-low power operation.
“Ultra-low power is key because it removes a common IoT adoption hurdle, which is frequent battery replacements. We’ve designed the SiWx917-family for up to 2 years of battery life leveraging Wi-Fi 6 features like ‘Target Wake Time’ while also architecting the device to have different sleep modes depending on its function at the time. This effort meant pulling together the best of the best from our wireless coexistence and compute leadership,” says Irvind Ghai, Vice President at Silicon Labs.
While the new SiWx917 chipset family may not technically be the world’s first Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE 5.4 IoT platform (although nearly all others IoT-specific offerings are Wi-Fi 4 capable only) – it is the first designed for IoT use cases from the ground up. And that includes features and flexible architecture addressing multiple Wi-Fi IoT use case for consumers and industry, Silicon Labs says.
The SiWx917 family supports three operational modes: As a self-contained SoC with no external host processor required, as a host-agnostic NCP (network co-processor) needing an external MCU host, and as a RCP (radio co-processor) where an external Linux host runs (part of) the Wi-Fi network stack.
“It is important to offer this flexibility as not every use case is the same, and a customer might want to get to market faster by simply upgrading their Wi-Fi connectivity in an existing design. The SoC and NCP are both in general availability, with the RCP to follow,” Irvind Ghai says.
Flexible memory options & ‘Developer Journey’
The new offerings come with up to 8 MB in-package stacked flash or up to 8 MB stacked PSRAM memory with support for optional external flash/PSRAM. Silicon Labs says the memory options are designed to address the largest possible market for Wi-Fi IoT devices. A further benefit is that using one flexible chipset family for multiple products protects developers’ software investment, Irvind Ghai says.
“The SiWx917 is designed to enable a broad range of IoT use cases within the home and industrial segments. HVAC, smart locks, cameras, sensors, and appliances are some of the typical SiWx917-targeted home applications with sensors, predictive maintenance, smart meters, asset tracking rounding out the portfolio,” says Irvind Ghai.
To enable future features and use cases the platform also includes an MVP (Matrix Vector Processor), which offloads ML operations for applications such as predictive maintenance, image recognition, and more. Finally the platform supports Matter over Wi-Fi and is pre-certified for both Matter by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, Silicon Labs says.
To help developers accelerate time-to-market for new Wi-Fi IoT devices, Silicon Labs has launched a new Wi-Fi Developer Journey offering a range of hardware development kits and guides to create sample applications. Add to this Silicon Labs’ popular Simplicity Studio development environment, and Irvind Ghai believes Silicon Lab is setting a new standard for Wi-Fi IoT development platforms.
“No matter how great the platform and the features, none of it matters if we can’t help our clients get products to market fast. That’s why our kits and tools continue to be incredibly important. They are unique to this industry and already familiar to thousands of developers,” says Irvind Ghai.
/Claus.
