What you'll learn:
- How the Matter standard helps create a more interoperable smart home.
- How does Matter work?
- The incorporation of machine learning into smart devices.
Life in the home is constantly changing as a multitude of wirelessly connected smart devices hit the shelves, bringing greater automation, energy savings, and convenience. Connected speakers, smart lights, automated window blinds, clever HVAC, and other kits can be remotely activated by smartphones or dedicated home assistants. And things are set to boom: By 2028, it's expected that over 785 million people will be living in smart homes worldwide, according to Statista.1
Still, challenges remain to realizing the full potential of the integrated smart home. One is that smart-home devices built for different ecosystems don’t always work well together. Second, chip resource limitations can restrict software holding back advanced applications. And suboptimal energy efficiency can impact device battery life, while security risks are a constant concern when smart-home ecosystems continuously access the cloud.
For the smart home to reach mass adoption, connected solutions must continue to evolve to meet these challenges (Fig. 1). The Matter protocol and low-power wireless technology are driving that evolution.
The New Smart-Home Standard that Matters
Matter—an open-source connectivity standard for the smart home developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA)—is helping resolve the fragmentation generated by discrete ecosystems. By providing interoperability between existing connectivity protocols from smart-home suppliers such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung, Matter promises to make life easier for both the developer and consumer.
Matter works by building on top of the existing smart-home wireless connectivity technologies—Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE), Wi-Fi, Thread (a secure wireless mesh network developed for the smart home), and the Ethernet wired protocol—by providing a unifying application layer (Fig. 2).
In a typical smart-home setup, lower-power Matter devices run across a Thread network, while devices that require higher power and data bandwidth use Wi-Fi. Matter supports the Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet protocols needed for device-to-device communication, while Bluetooth LE is employed for commissioning and configuring new devices to a network.
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By creating a standardized specification, Matter gives manufacturers a common data model with which to develop, ultimately guaranteeing the compatibility and interoperability of their products with those from other makers. And for consumers, Matter promises simplicity when setting up and using their new products.
Matter Needs Improved Performance, Efficiency, and Security
In advanced Matter applications, wireless SoCs require the computational power and memory capacity to not only run the Matter application layer, but also the wireless protocol(s) and application software needed for connectivity as well as to operate the window blinds, lights, or connected speakers.
A good example of Matter support is Nordic Semiconductor's nRF54H Series that integrates multiple Arm Cortex-M33 processors and RISC-V coprocessors (Fig. 3). Each of the nRF54H20’s Arm Cortex and RISC-V processors can be optimized for a specific type of workload. While many wireless SoC processors are optimized for either efficiency or performance, developers can take advantage of both attributes by dynamically changing between configurations.
State-of-the-art security is important for Matter support and the chip exceeds the requirements of PSA Certified Level 3 (the highest in the PSA Certified IoT security standard), including secure boot, secure firmware update, secure storage, and protection against physical attacks. That will make smart-home products built using the SoCs among the most secure devices on the market.
Machine Learning for the Matter-Based Smart Home
While today’s smart-home products might not yet leverage machine learning (ML), tomorrow’s surely will. The nRF54H processors can cope with the edge computing needed to identify trends that indicate things might be changing. The edge computing can be assisted by software to help run ML models looking for deviations in sensor trends and forwarding only the key information required for further action. That saves energy and extends battery life.
Such models can help optimize smart-home product performance affected by external factors. For instance, they could correct HVAC humidity settings because members of the household have all arrived home together, or change the LED color temperature to adjust illumination while children do their homework. Or make a gradual adjustment to window-blind closure time as the sun begins to set earlier each day.
Optimized for the Smart Home
Matter runs on Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth LE for commissioning. Thus, multiprotocol SoCs are an optimal fit for smart-home solutions based on the new application protocol.
According to Vantage Market Research, a global smart-home market worth $91.3 billion in 2022 will expand to a value of $195.73 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.0% percent over the forecast period.2 With initiatives like Matter and chipmakers like Nordic Semiconductor helping developers create better products, the world is on track to reach the full potential of the smart home.
References
1. “Number of users of smart homes worldwide from 2019 to 2028."
2. “Smart Home Market – Global Industry Assessment and Forecast.”
