Silicon Labs Enters Turnkey IoT Market With ZigBee for Lighting, Motion Sensing

Silicon Labs bowed reference designs said to streamline development of ZigBee-based home automation, connected lighting and smart gateway products. Silicon Labs’ entry to turnkey IoT, based on the company’s Golden Unit home automation software stack and ZigBee SoC (system-on-chip) mesh networking technology, includes hardware, firmware and software tools, said the company. The designs are said to reduce the complexity of connecting ZigBee devices, such as lights, dimmer switches and door/window contact sensors, in a home network, Silicon Labs said. The Golden Unit ZigBee stack allows LED lights to join, interoperate and leave a mesh network and to scale from a few to hundreds of light nodes on the same network, it said, while the connected lights can support white, color temperature tuning and RGB color settings as well as dimming. The designs include a capacitive-sense dimmable light switch and a small-form-factor door/window contact sensor that provide color, color tuning and dimming control and are wireless, battery-controlled and have no moving parts, said the company. Capacitive sensing in the switch design can detect gestures including touch, hold and swipe, and the contact sensor design provides the tools for creating wireless, battery-powered sensors for monitoring door and window positions, the company said. Silicon Labs is offering two ZigBee gateway options to complement the reference designs: a plug-and-play USB virtual gateway that works with any PC development platform and supports the Windows, OS X and Linux environments as a virtual machine; and an “out-of-the-box” Wi-Fi/Ethernet gateway reference design based on an embedded Linux computer system, it said.