Silicon Labs' third-generation wireless development platform leads the development of the Internet of Things

Silicon Labs Demonstrates the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Shaping the Future of Wireless Connectivity

Beijing, China – October 14, 2024 – Silicon Labs (also known as “Silicon Labs”), a global leader committed to building a more connected world with secure, intelligent wireless connectivity technologies, recently delivered the opening keynote at the inaugural Embedded World North America. The company’s CEO Matt Johnson and CTO Daniel Cooley discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) is driving changes in the Internet of Things (IoT) and detailed the continued success of Silicon Labs’ evolving second-generation wireless development platform and the upcoming third-generation wireless development platform.

“AI is quickly becoming a key growth catalyst that will propel the number of IoT devices to more than 100 billion in the next decade,” said Matt Johnson, president and CEO of Silicon Labs . “Our upcoming third-generation platform, with its unmatched performance and productivity, will unlock new applications and capabilities for a broad range of industries, from manufacturing and retail to transportation, healthcare, energy distribution, fitness and agriculture, helping to transform them in extraordinary ways.”

To realize this vision, IoT devices need powerful upgrades in connectivity, computing power, security, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities. Silicon Labs revealed more about its third-generation platform that will make this vision a reality during its presentation.

Third-generation platform SoC will feature world’s most flexible modem, most secure and most scalable memory

The third generation platform products will be able to meet the challenges brought by the continued acceleration of the Internet of Things: the need for more processing power in far-edge devices in all IoT applications in key areas, including but not limited to smart cities and civil infrastructure, commercial buildings, retail and warehouses, smart factories and Industry 4.0, smart homes, connected health; and the need for increasingly portable, secure, and compute-intensive applications. The third generation platform products meet the challenges by meeting the key needs of the evolving Internet of Things:

• Connectivity: The full Gen3 platform portfolio will include dozens of products covering all major protocols and frequency bands to connect virtually anything. The first Gen3 platform product features the world’s most flexible IoT modem, capable of true concurrency on three wireless networks with microsecond channel switching.

• Computing power: The third-generation platform products will adopt a multi-core design with an Arm Cortex-M application processor and dedicated coprocessors for RF and security subsystems, as well as a dedicated high-performance machine learning subsystem for some models. With the most scalable memory architecture in its class, coupled with Cortex-M processors (from 133 MHz Cortex-M33 to dual Cortex-M55 running at more than 200 MHz), the third-generation platform products can support complex applications and embedded real-time operating systems.

• Security: All Gen3 platform products will support Silicon Labs Secure Vault High technology and have other features such as in-place authentication to support trusted communications between devices and the cloud. Gen3 platform products will also have the world's most secure memory interface, which can harden one of the main attack vectors when an intruder gains physical access and protect the intellectual property of device manufacturers. Gen3 platforms will also adopt the post-quantum cryptographic standards recently released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

• Intelligence: Advanced third-generation platform products will feature Silicon Labs’ second-generation matrix vector processor, which can offload complex machine learning operations from the main CPU to a specialized accelerator designed to improve machine learning performance in battery-powered wireless devices by up to 100 times while significantly reducing power consumption.

A key driver in the design of this IoT revolution is data, which flows back and forth between edge devices and the cloud. This two-way flow makes IoT edge devices an ideal partner in the growing field of artificial intelligence. Not only can these devices be used to make limited decisions at the edge, such as a smart thermostat that assesses ambient temperature and adjusts the home's HVAC, but as large-scale cloud-based AI applications emerge, edge devices can also play a key role as data acquisition devices and apply their machine learning capabilities to better sift valuable data from the noisy data. The ability to identify and transmit "corner case" data is valued by AI operators, which can make their systems smarter.

The first third-generation platform SoC is currently in customer trials and more information will be announced in the first half of 2025.

The first and second generation platform SoCs continue to develop and fully respond to various technical requirements

Silicon Labs' first- and second-generation platform products have continued to succeed in helping to scale the Internet of Things, provide secure and robust connections, and open up new applications. Today, Silicon Labs' second-generation platform has made new progress with the general availability of a series of new Wi-Fi 6 and low-power Bluetooth (Bluetooth LE) chips, including: SiWG917 wireless MCU (SoC), SiWN917 network coprocessor for managed applications, and SiWT917 RF coprocessor for applications running high-end operating systems. The SiWx917 family of products was designed from the beginning for ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6 applications, and in specific IoT applications, it can provide up to 2 years of battery life on a single AAA battery.

Earlier this year, Silicon Labs introduced the BG26 and MG26 products that support Bluetooth and 802.15.4 connectivity. As the demand for the Internet of Things grows, these wireless SoCs are built for future development and use the same matrix vector processor dedicated to machine learning as the upcoming third-generation platform products. The MG26 and BG26 have twice the flash memory, RAM and GPIO of their predecessors, an innovation that also won them the IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award.

Silicon Labs' second-generation platform products can also be applied to emerging areas related to environmental IoT. This exciting new technology allows IoT devices to harvest energy from surrounding environmental resources, such as indoor or outdoor ambient light, ambient radio waves, and active motion. In collaboration with power management integrated circuit (PMIC) manufacturer e-peas, Silicon Labs has launched the xG22E, an ultra-low power variant of the xG22 wireless SoC that significantly reduces the power budget and uses an advanced sleep/wake-up engine to operate within the power consumption range of environmental IoT. The xG22E is widely used in commercial applications such as sensors, switches, and electronic shelf labels.

In 2025, Silicon Labs will launch more products on its second-generation platform. The first-generation platform, second-generation platform, and third-generation platform will coexist to provide powerful products for a large number of IoT applications.

These SoCs are just a small part of Silicon Labs’ broadest portfolio of wireless SoCs and MCUs designed specifically for IoT. No other IoT vendor can match Silicon Labs in terms of technology breadth, depth, and expertise.

Join Silicon Labs Works With to explore the future of IoT

In order to convey this expertise to IoT developers and designers, Silicon Labs will hold a physical Works With Developer Conference at Shanghai Marriott Marquis Hotel on October 24. This conference will focus more on the Chinese market, and through a series of wonderful keynote speeches, wonderful sharing and roundtable discussions by ecosystem giants, technical implementation and rich demonstrations, it will provide an excellent platform for further communication and interaction, and joint innovation for professionals in the IoT field, and help participants grasp trends and control the future with advanced technologies.