A small platoon of electronics companies announced collaborations on Amazon Sidewalk, a new shared wireless network for IoT consumer devices.
Among the partners are Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments and Semtech, according to their separate company announcements.
Sidewalk is operated by Amazon at no charge to users and helps them simplify new device setup, but more importantly extends the working range of low-bandwidth devices so users can stay online even when outside their home’s Wi-Fi range. The network could help enable limited offline connectivity for motion alerts from security cameras, in one example described by Silicon Labs.
In a blog, Amazon said its employees and their friends and family joined together to conduct a test using 700 Ring lighting products with 900 MHz connections for a low-bandwidth secure network.
Sidewalk supports Bluetooth Low Energy, Frequency Shift Keying and Chirp Spread Spectrum in the 900 MHz band.
In a separate blog, TI listed five of its low-power, multi-band devices with various security enablers for Sidewalk, including a CC1352R wireless microcontroller and the CC1352P wireless MCU which includes a power amplifier for extended range. With the different MCUs, TI said developers can build apps for the Sidewalk protocol and BLE for ease in over-the-air firmware updates.
TI also has a Sidewalk-ready development kit to help integrate sensors with low-power sub-1GHz BLE.
Semtech announced its LoRa platform also supports Sidewalk. LoRa is a low power, long range wide area network platform.
Amazon and its various partners are expected to see a global smart home market that will grow to $192 billion in 2023, up from $41 billion in 2018, according to IHS Markit.