Shubham Sawarkar
Silicon Labs, a Texas semiconductor company, has described how some of its customers are preparing for the Matter standard’s release using SoCs it announced sooner this year.
Matter, AI and machine learning (ML), multiprotocol, and Bluetooth are the focus of the BG24 and MG24 devices. The alpha program received more than fifty people from around the world, and Silicon Labs has shared some of the early adopters’ successes.
Viessman, a heating and refrigeration company, is leveraging the BG24 and MG24 SoCs’ low energy consumption to develop battery-powered heating and refrigeration products.
The MG24 is a smart IoT device featuring a 2.4GHz radio, low power consumption, 1.5Mbyte of flash storage, and 256kbyte of RAM that targets Zigbee, OpenThread, and Matter protocols. Viessmann was able to market its battery-powered ViCare heating system and refrigeration products because of the large range of peripherals and low current consumption.
The ViCare system embeds Zigbee gateway capability into appliances without the need for additional hardware. The MG24 also includes an integrated analog-to-digital converter and a DC-DC converter, both of which help to minimize PCB space and enable the creation of applications with very compact form factors.
Edge Impulse is offering an embedded ML platform for companies developing AI-aware products using the BG24 and MG24. Edge Impulse allows embedded developers to create digital twins that are less complex, more contextual, and easier to produce using automatic data labeling, pre-built digital signal processing and machine learning blocks and live classification testing.
SensiML is exploring intelligent applications with the built-in AI and ML accelerator on the BG24 and MG24 SoCs. Silicon Labs and SensiML collaborated to develop TinyML smart IoT sensing apps faster.
Designers can augment embedded systems with AI and ML capabilities using Silicon Labs’ ML development tools, even in low-power wireless IoT devices. Sensor-data processing for anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, audio pattern recognition such as glass-break detecting, and simple-command phrase recognition are just a few of the smart industrial and home applications enabled by ML computing at the edge. The SensiML analytics toolkit speeds up the creation of customized AI sensor models for intelligent endpoints, allowing insights to be generated in real-time at the embedded device.
“Integrating Edge Impulse with the built-in machine learning accelerator on the BG24 and MG24 enables up to four times faster processing of machine learning algorithms with up to six times lower power consumption while offloading the main CPU for other applications, enabling smarter and faster edge devices with long battery life and new potential workloads,” said Zach Shelby, CEO at Edge Impulse. “By minimizing latency and traffic over the internet for time-sensitive applications, we are strengthening privacy and security, taking full advantage of MG24 and BG24 right at the edge.”
Nanoleaf, a smart lighting company for the home, is using MG24’s Matter support to create smart home products that can be integrated into the user’s preferred ecosystem. Nanoleaf hopes that the MG24 will open the path for the Matter standard, which seeks to build a unified smart home based on open communications and adaptability.
Tuya, an IoT development platform, is combining the MG24 and Matter to unify the 400,000 IoT products it supports, which total 200 million devices per year. It established a development platform with over 510,000 registered developers from more than 200 nations and regions. Tuya-powered smart devices are sold through 100,000 online and offline outlets worldwide.
The company looked at three factors while choosing MG24 to be a part of the Tuya platform. First, it needed enough processing power and RAM to manage the systems that the company is helping its customers with. Second, Tuya required a wide range of IO in order to create a wider range of IoT devices. Finally, it favors Matter-compatible chips so that its clients may participate in the smart home connectivity standard.
Leedarson, a company that helps manufacturers with the development, testing, and deployment of IoT products, is using Matter on the MG24 so that its customers can benefit from the interoperability and have the assurance that a single application can grow across multiple projects.
It specializes in smart home device R&D and manufacturing to develop, build, test, and deliver solutions that allow consumers to experience the IoT’s promise. The firm has been a strong supporter of the Matter standard.
