Silicon Labs' Connected Home solution with the best ZigBee and Thread connectivity debuts

     Silicon Labs, a leading provider of silicon chips and software solutions for a smart, connected world, announced the launch of a complete series of ZigBee product reference designs designed to help developers reduce time to market and simplify the development of ZigBee-based home automation, connected lighting and smart gateway products. In the first of a series of turnkey IoT solutions from Silicon Labs, the new reference design includes all the hardware, firmware, and software tools developers need to build interoperable, scalable, feature-rich connected home products. It is all based on Silicon Labs' powerful and industry-leading ZigBee "Golden Unit" smart home (HA 1.2) software protocol stack and ZigBee system-on-chip (SoC) mesh networking technology.

     Lee Ratliff, principal analyst for connectivity and iot at IHS Technology, said: "The connected home is one of the most attractive markets in wireless connectivity, and a large number of applications such as home automation and connected lighting are driving it and growing at an extremely fast rate. IHS predicts that shipments of connected home devices will grow from 59 million in 2015 to 193 million in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of more than 48%. Ratliff believes that successful connected home products must be standards-based, easy for users to deploy, designed to run in the real world, and solve specific problems with minimal complexity."

     Silicon Labs has created a cost-effective reference design that greatly simplifies the development of ZigBee connected products such as lights, dimmer switches, door/window contact sensors, and more in connected home networks. As more consumers buy "do-it-yourself" connected Home products at major home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowes, this simplicity of design will translate into great ease of use.

     Silicon Labs' ZigBee Connected Lighting reference design features wireless lighting panels and plug-in demo boards for quick demonstrations and testing. The Gold Unit ZigBee stack allows LED lights to reliably join, interoperate and leave the mesh network, and also supports scaling from a few to hundreds of light nodes in the same network. Connected lighting supports white light, color temperature adjustment and RGB color Settings, as well as dimming.

     Silicon Labs' ZigBee-based home automation reference design includes a capacitive sensing dimmer switch and a small size door/window contact sensor. The dimmer switch provides color selection, color adjustment, and dimmer control functions not supported by traditional switches. Unlike traditional switches, these wireless, battery-powered switches have no moving mechanical parts and can be placed anywhere in the home. The switch design uses Silicon Labs' EFM8 capacitive sensing MCU to detect different user gestures (touch, hold and swipe). The contact Sensor reference design provides all the tools needed to create a wireless, battery-powered sensor that can monitor the door/window position (open or closed). One of the useful features is the automatic triggering of indoor lighting.