 Hi, I'm MPI. Hi, I'm MPI. I brought you by. Did you key this week at Silicon Labs? Lady Aida, what is the new product introduction this week? I'm glad you asked. Yes, this week is from Silicon Labs, which I call PsiLabs, even though I know that's not definitely their name, but I'll try to remember to say Silicon Labs. So this week's I at MPI is on, okay, we're going to go with it. Silicon Labs, EFR, 32 MG 24 dev board, but also the chips. This is an adorable little dev kit that's under 40 bucks. And it's a great way to get started with their chipset. It has debug interface as well as you can see. Stem IQT slash quick sensors, a micro bus compatible GPIO port. That's also, you know, point one inch spacing for easy connectivity. So buttons and of course the EFR 32 MG 24 chip, which can be used to do, which is a Cortex M33 that also has a radio in it that can do stuff like ZigBee and also use with matter. This is a series of chips that's used in that dev kit. So we're going to kind of talk about both because if you get the dev kit, it's probably because you want to integrate this chip into your design. So as mentioned, this is a Cortex M33 and it's 78 megahertz. I think it's up to 1.5 megabytes of flash and up to 256 K of memory. I think like the smallest is maybe half a K of flash, half a mega flash and half 128 K of RAM. But also it's got a ton of peripherals. One thing that Silicon Labs is famous for is their crossbar, which allows you to kind of connect any peripheral, any pin. They've got lots of timers and ADC and low power mode. They're very good at the low power integration. And of course the built in radio, which is kind of what you're here for, you know, you can get all sorts of Cortex M33s, but it's not really common to get one that has a 2.4 gigahertz radio in it. And Silicon Labs also excellent at their radio stacks. So, you know, you could use this just for playing ZigBee, but in specific or, you know, VLE, it looks like they actually have support for that as well, which is kind of cool. But what I think they're really pushing for this chip to be used for is not just ZigBee or maybe VLE, but specifically to be used with Matter, which is a kind of new and new standard way for Internet of Things home devices to connect. So you can check out, here's all the MCU peripherals. We won't talk about those. You can see them. And of course the low power modes you can get under 33 microamps in an active sleep mode up to down to 1.3 microamps in a deep sleep. So that's really, really low, much lower than other Cortex chips that we know, or even Tencelca chips. So, Matter, which is a new high level application layer for wireless protocols that want to connect to stuff in the home or in the office. It's from the Connectivity Standards Association, I think is the name, the CSA, which used to be the ZigBee Alliance. And ZigBee, you know, you're probably aware that they were used for stuff like two Philips Hue lights and other home automation sensors and control boards for home or office automation. ZigBee is a very common protocol because it's extremely low cost, sorry, a transport because it's extremely low cost, very simple. It uses 2.4 gigahertz, which is, you know, free to use band. Yeah, antennas are easy to get. Chipsets are easy to get. You can go into low power. You don't have the thing with Wi-Fi. We have to have an access point and password. You know, it's usually done by RSI location or, you know, you're pressing a button on something so you know that you have to synchronize. The problem is, is that everybody had their own, sorry, it was taken, not six days back there. Everybody had their own ZigBee or other low level protocol application level on top of ZigBee that would make it not work. So for example, your Hue lights would not necessarily work with any other controllers or light systems that you'd have in your home. So every time you bought something, you'd have like these little siloed platforms and integrations that wouldn't mesh together, pun intended. So the idea behind matter is that you would be able to interoperate with any device and controller inside the home. So you won't have to sort of start from scratch with creating custom gateways and custom applications and protocols. For each device, you can have a temperature sensor and it'll work with everything that already exists in the matter ecosystem. And this is useful because so much stuff in IoT has different transports. So for example, you might have, you know, an air pod that, or home pod that uses Wi-Fi and you might have, you know, a Facebook portal and that connects over Ethernet. You might have stuff that connects over Bluetooth or cellular or ZigBee or Z-Wave or even Laura or 433 MHz bands. All these transports usually, not only are they, of course, you can't have Bluetooth connected to the cellular without having a gateway, but also the application layers above them would be customized. So if you look at what's often called the seven-layer OSI model, the transport layer four and below, you know, that's what is Ethernet, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, whatever, but then everything above that, layers five, six and seven, would also be custom. And that's what matter is trying to replace. So don't think of matter as something that is inexorably tied to ZigBee. If you're creating something with this Xilabs chip set that uses 2.4 GHz, the goal is that it would be able to interoperate with devices that are using Z-Wave or Bluetooth or cellular or Wi-Fi, because they would share that upper three layers. And speaking of layers, don't forget, seven-layer burrito also another example of seven layers. So this is, we're talking about sour cream and above here, matter. So, and this is a nice diagram from Google, you know, and speaking of Google, this is one of the nice things about what you decide to go with matter is that no matter your protocol or your hardware, Google, Apple, sorry, Google slash Nest, Apple and Amazon, all basically agreed all their stuff is going to work with matter. And so you can have your little device work with these, you know, very large companies, you don't have to worry about like, oh, are they going to change something in the protocol that will push me out or do I have to pay them a licensing fee? You might have to pay a licensing fee to matter, but you won't have to pay a fee or develop for each individual HomePod slash Nest Cam slash, you know, Facebook display slash Alexa. So the interoperability is what you're going to get. Of course that adds your layers of, I would say complexity, but of abstraction. So you do need to have a fairly good chip because there's security layers on top of this and the application layers and you have to have it, of course, fit well within the matter framework. You can't just kind of make up your own thing. You really want to use their own SDK. I think that's probably why the MG 25 comes with so much RAM and so much flash. That's also really nice because you have a lot of room to add encryption security and layers of checking and interpretation that you're not going to have very basic errors with buffer management. That's just taking care of for you. And Silabs has a lot of chips, boards and software stacks and resources for people who want to use matter with their IoT devices. Honestly, if you're starting now, you're probably in a company and you have to create a home device and now you can't just have it be battery operated with a couple of LEDs. It has to connect to the internet. It has to connect to the rest of the devices in somebody's home. It has to be controllable from somebody's phone. Instead of having a custom Bluetooth app for your Bluetooth device, if you make it use Bluetooth but have matter as an application level compatibility, you don't have to worry about having it work with HomePods, Alexa's Nest, whatever, iPhones, androids. It'll just magically work. Sort of like if you want to have a website, that website, you can write the website design on a Mac, but you can view it on Windows or an Android or an iPhone. It is a standard. So part of that is that, and it just seems to be based on IP from TCPIP, you get to choose your transport. In this case, we're talking about ZigBee, of course, but you can also use Wi-Fi or Ethernet or cellular, whatever. So if you need to step up from the throughput rates, but also the power rating of ZigBee, don't worry, you can always change the underlying transport and keep that upper layer of matter compatibility. Part of that is, though, you will have to be certified. So you can't just throw something into the matter ecosystem and put the matter logo on it and say, okay, I'm good to go. You have to play nicely with everything else because there's going to be a lot of devices, all talking to each other on whatever transport and whatever gateway, and you want to make sure that you behave nicely. You don't overwhelm devices. You don't bash on there. You don't DDoS the host controllers and you don't interfere with the addressing that you would have for other devices on the same transport. And certification is something that you're going to have to go through. That's not surprising, though. If you do Bluetooth or ZigBee, you have to get that certified anyways. So this is a certification you're probably going to go with. Check out. There's a white paper from Silicon Labs on how to certify your devices. Of course, if you start with a known SDK and hardware, it's going to be a lot easier. And then there's also DigiKey and Silicon Labs. They just had a webinar that you can view on demand. You just register with, you know, I think it's the on 24 service and you can view the webinar at any time. And of course there's app engineers at Matter ready to help you out. Another fun fact about the MG24 series is this Think Plus Matter from SparkFun, which was released, could be another really nice hardware dev board that's feather wing compatible, has also STEMI QT port, quick port and has the EFR 32 chip set. And also circuit Python support. I will say that circuit Python support doesn't have that matter layer yet. But if you want to just get started with this chip and learn the peripherals and how they act and behave, Silicon Labs did do a circuit Python board support package for this chip family. It's kind of nice. And then chips are in stock, various sizes of flash memory and pinout. Here's one for example, that's in stock. It's about five bucks in quantity and there's a thousand ready to integrate. So you don't have to worry about, you know, chip shortage, you know, you sign up for something and you don't get it for a year or two. They're in stock for immediate integration. There's also ready to go modules that have passives and antennas pre tuned for you. So they're a little bit more expensive, but you'll definitely get into production much faster. And of course the dev kit in question, there's over 250 in stock and under 40 bucks. And I think it's a great way to get started because it has the J-Link and USB and pinouts and everything ready to go. So you can play them play with a lot of hardware. Lots of sensors are available. You know, Adafruit, we have a Digi-Key stopped, you know, hundreds of different Stemic UT sensors and sort of SparkFun. They have quick sensors. You can use a quick to grove adapter to get your, whatever IoT sensing element you want to have done. And then you can work on the matter layer and software using Silicon Labs SDK. And then stock 257 at the time of this viewing. And then there's a short video. We're going to play this, then we're going to roll right into... All about matter. What is matter? Matter enables developers to create devices that connect to experiences and ecosystems of users' choice. But there's a really important feature in that statement. Ecosystems. As in, more than one. With Multi-Admin, a foundational feature in matter, users can connect matter devices to multiple apps and ecosystems locally, securely, and even simultaneously. Right now, choosing the right IoT device can be challenging. Users need to take extra effort to determine if a device they want will work with their ecosystem. And for those smart home users who have more than one preferred app or ecosystem, family members may have different brand preferences for their smart home, mobile, or other control touch points. Or they may want to share only specific devices with people in their household or those that visit and take care of it. To enable this today, product developers have to support each other's ecosystem protocols. Users have to manage more complicated purchase experiences or, with multiple ecosystems, navigate setup and account linking across them adding a new one is a painstaking process. Today, sharing devices isn't always possible or it requires sharing more information in devices than users want. Multi-Admin lets users connect their devices to any matter supporting ecosystem they want, whether that's a single product developers app or multiple smart home platforms. Users can control which devices they share with which systems on an individual level and can easily add multiple devices to a new ecosystem to try out new experiences. Multi-Admin truly delivers on matters promise of user choice and interoperability. It lets users choose the brands and devices they love, choose the experience and ecosystem they'll work with and know that their smart home will be able to grow with them and the choices they make in the future. Matter, it's what connects the world.