matter News - Page 9 of 9 - CNX Software

July 10, 2022July 10, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Espressif unveils “One-Stop Matter Solution” for ESP32 wireless SoC’s

Espressif Systems have announced their one-stop Matter solution that features their ESP32, ESP32-C, and ESP32-S series wireless microcontrollers with WiFi and/or Bluetooth LE connectivity, as well as the ESP32-H series with an 802.15.4 radio for Thread and Zigbee connectivity. Matter, which was first introduced in 2019 as Project CHIP, aims to improve interoperability among Smart Home products, has a focus on security, and the protocol is supposed to work on top of the most popular communication standards like Ethernet, Thread, 802.15.4, WiFI, Bluetooth, and so on, but more on that later. The first commercial products with support for Matter are scheduled for the end of the year, so all major vendors of wireless chips have already introduced Matter-ready solutions including NXP, Silicon Labs, Nordic Semi, and others. Espressif had actually already talked about Matter support with the announcement of the ESP32-C2 chip. But the recent announcement targets all Espressif’s ESP32 […]

June 15, 2022June 20, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Nordic Thingy:53 is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 platform for IoT prototyping

As one should have expected after Nordic Thingy:52 and Thingy:91 IoT devkits were introduced in 2017 and 2019 respectively, the Norwegian company has now launched the Thingy:53 platform based on Nordic Semi nRF5340 dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 SoC for IoT prototyping with Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Matter, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, NFC, and Bluetooth mesh RF protocols. The development kit also incorporates the nPM1100 PMIC and nRF21540 Front End Module (FEM), a power amplifier/low noise amplifier (PA/LNA) range extender, as well as multiple motion and environmental sensors, as well as a rechargeable 1350 mAh Li-Po battery for power. Nordic Thingy:53 specifications: SoC – Nordic Semi nRF5340 SoC with 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 Application core with 1 MB Flash + 512 KB RAM, and a 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 Network core with 256 KB Flash + 64 KB RAM Wireless connectivity RF front-end nRF21540 FEM Protocols – Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth Mesh, NFC, Thread/Zigbee, […]

May 16, 2022August 9, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Embedded World 2022 – June 21-23 – Virtual Schedule

Embedded World 2020 was a lonely affair with many companies canceling attendance due to COVID-19, and Embedded World 2021 took place online only. But Embedded World is back to Nuremberg, Germany in 2022 albeit with the event moved from the traditional month of February to June 21-23. Embedded systems companies and those that service them will showcase their latest solution at their respective booths, and there will be a conference with talks and classes during the three-day event. The programme is up, so I made my own little Embedded World 2022 virtual schedule as there may be a few things to learn, even though I won’t be attending. Tuesday, June 21, 2022 10:00 – 13:00 – Rust, a Safe Language for Low-level Programming Rust is a relatively new language in the area of systems and low-level programming. Its main goals are performance, correctness, safety, and productivity. While still ~70% of […]

April 25, 2022April 25, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

ESP32-C2 WiFi & Bluetooth LE 5.0 chip to support Matter WiFi protocol

Espressif ESP32-C2 is a new WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.0 chip the Shanghai-headquartered company has been working on since last year. The company claims it has better RF performance due to a smaller package reducing stray parasitics, and it will support the Matter protocol whose first version should become ratified later this year. The first ESP32-C2 product wafers have been received by the Shanghai team in spite of the current lockdown and quarantine in Shanghai due to the COVID-19, and teams in other parts of Asia, Europe, and Singapore are working without interruption on software integration into ESP-IDF and ESP-RainMaker. ESP32-C2 preliminary specifications: RISC-V core 272KB of memory Connectivity WiFi 4 + BLE 5.0 Tx power 20 dBm (FCC limit) 18 dBm for 802.11N MC7 packets (72.2 Mbps) Receiver sensitivity – -97 to -100 dBm for 1 Mbps 802.11B packets. Receive current – 58 mA Package – 4 x […]

January 24, 2022January 25, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Silicon Labs BG24 and MG24 2.4 GHz wireless MCU’s quadruple AI performance at a fraction of the energy

Machine Learning is getting everywhere including into 2.4GHz wireless microcontrollers with SIlicon Labds BG24 Bluetooth and MG24 multi-protocol Cortex-M33 microcontrollers that improve AI/ML performance by 4 times using 1/6th of the energy thanks to a built-in AI accelerator. That makes the new microcontrollers suitable for battery-powered edge AI devices with support for Matter (coming soon) as well as PSA Level 3 Secure Vault protection. Silicon Labs expects the chips to be found in various smart home, medical and industrial applications. BG24 and MG24 share the same block diagram and the same specifications apart from the supported wireless protocols: MCU core – Arm Cortex-M33 @ 78.0 MHz with DSP instruction and floating-point unit Memory – Up to 256 kB RAM data memory Storage – Up to 1536 kB flash program memory Wireless CPU – Arm Cortex-M0+ 2.4 GHz Radio Performance -104.5 dBm sensitivity @ 250 kbps O-QPSK DSSS -104.9 dBm sensitivity […]

January 6, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

NXP IW612 Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, 802.15.4 tri-radio solution supports Matter

Matter, previously known as Project Chip, is a unified interface for Smart Home devices to improve interoperability between devices from different manufacturers and associated services like Google Assitant or Amazon Alexa. Matter can work over Thread, WiFi, Ethernet, BLE, etc… so it’s not limited by the physical layer. So far, we mostly heard about development related to Matter, and Espressif has published a series of posts about Matter to be for instance used by their upcoming ESP32-H2 wireless MCU, but I had not seen many other solutions, not commercial products. This is going to change in 2022, as Belkin announced it’s working on “redesigned smart plugs and lighting solutions” with support for Matter over Thread” that start selling this summer. Separately, NXP also announced the IW612 tri-radio solution with Matter support and dual-band WiFI 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and 802.15.4 radios. NXP IW612 IW612 key features and specifications: Dedicated, independent CPUs […]

September 16, 2021April 5, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Home Assistant Yellow – A Raspberry Pi CM4 based automation gateway (Crowdfunding)

The team behind the popular Home Assistant open-source home automation framework has just launched their second hardware with Home Assistant Yellow automation gateway based on Raspberry Pi CM4 module. This follows last year’s ODROID-N2+ based Home Assistant Blue which was a limited edition and has now been discontinued, albeit still supported. The carrier board for Home Assistant Amber is designed from scratch and notably includes Silicon Labs MGM210P Mighty Gecko Module with support for Zigbee 3.0, OpenThread, and Matter (Soon), as well as M.2 socket that can take an NVMe SSD, or an AI accelerator card. Home Assistant Yellow specifications: Supported SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) with Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor @ 1.5 GHz, up to 8GB RAM, up to 32GB storage. (Note: optional WiFI 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity not covered by regulatory approval) Storage – Support for NVMe SSD via M.2 socket, bootable for […]

May 12, 2021May 12, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

The Zigbee Alliance renames to the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), Project CHIP becomes “Matter”

connectivity-standards association matter

The Zigbee Alliance is/was an organization of hundreds of companies creating, maintaining, and delivering open standards for Zigbee… and other Internet of Things (IoT) standards including Smart Energy, Green Power, JupiterMesh, rf4ce, Dotdot, etc… Since the organization does not reflect its involvement beyond Zigbee, the name has just been changed to the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), and while they were at it they also rebranded “Project CHIP” (Connected Home over IP) to “Matter”, maybe because “connectivity standards matter!” 😉 There’s also a new website csa-iot.org but it may not have complete information just yet, and they invite you to access the Full website (https://zigbeealliance.org/about/) for extra details. Nothing much has changed here besides the name. But there’s more to report about Matter. A dedicated website has launched for the new standard, although the code remains under the Project Chip GitHub account at this time. What’s more interesting is that formal […]