Silicon Labs announced two new chips and two new dev platforms for IoT deployments on Tuesday at its third annual Works With 2022 developers conference as CEO Matt Johnson forecast a bright future for both smart homes and smart communities, including industrial, needing edge IoT.
Johnson delivered a keynote at the virtual event with representatives from Google and Amazon in support of the coming Matter protocol and Amazon Sidewalk network. “It’s an exciting time in the industry and adoption rates have really started to accelerate,” he said to reporters afterwards.
Since divesting itself of businesses outside of IoT, he said the company has doubled in size. Last year’s revenues reached $887 million, followed by year-to-year increases in the first two quarters of 2022. The Austin-based company has projected the total edge IoT market to mushroom to $17 billion in 2025, up from $7 billion in 2019.
Even with so much promise, the company’s stock has dropped 36% since the start of the year as chip designers broadly have been ravaged by economic, supply and trade uncertainty. Shares of SLAB dropped 2% mid-day Tuesday to 128.53.
Johnson said more than half of its revenues come from industrial applications as customers see ROIs on investments in nine months to 24 months. During the pandemic, he said digital shelf labels became popular with retailers.
New products
One of the chips announced Tuesday is the FG25 for low-power, wide area networks such as Wi-SUN with longer range and higher data rates in an open standard, considered ideal for smart city, ag and industrial deployments, the company said.
It is based on an ARM Cortex-M33 processor and is designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes that potentially could allow a city engineer to connect streetlights, cameras, weather stations, smart meters, traffic systems and more. When paired with a new EFFo1 RF Front End Module, power can be amplified to increase the range to 3 kilometers in a dense environment. Both products are sampling with customers.
Also announced was a wireless dev kit for Amazon Sidewalk, currently sampling. Silicon Labs said it is working with Oxit, an IoT design services company, and New Cosmos USA on a gas alarm running on the Silicon Labs Amazon Sidewalk platform in North Carolina. A connected DeNova Detect natural gas alarms can provide real-time gas leak alerts. Sidewalk will help the alarms with extended battery life and other benefits.
The other chip is Matter ready to provide Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE compatibility for use in smarthome applications. Called the SiWx917, it is designed for low power, long battery life for both wireless standards. It is currently sampling and generally availability is expected in Q3 2023.
Johnson said Silicon Labs will have complete support for developers with the coming Matter protocol, supporting Matter over Wi-Fi, Matter over Thread, BLE and Matter bridges to Zig bee and Z-Wave. The Matter dev platform includes the Silicon Labs 2.4 GHz wireless MG24 SoC, releases earlier in 2022, that supports a range of 200 mters indoors for OpenThread while also enabling Bluetooth commissioning of new devices on the same chip. With MG24 combined with the RS9116 Wi-Fi, develoeprs can provide Matter over Wi-Fi 4, followed by a transition to the Wi-Fi 6 single chip Matter SoC when available in 2023, the company said.
Reducing complexity while supporting open interoerability were big themes for Silicon Labs at its Works With event. “We’re here supporting multiple protocols and ecosystem,” Johnson said in keynote remarks. “No company is better focused.”
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