Overview#

Silicon Labs is developing products designed to meet customer demands as we move to an ever-connected world of devices in the home, often referred to as the IoT (Internet of Things). At a high level, the IoT goals for Silicon Labs are to:

  • Connect all devices in the home with best-in-class mesh networking, whether with Ember ZigBee PRO or other emerging standards.

  • Leverage the company’s expertise in low-power, constrained devices.

  • Enhance established low-power, mixed-signal chips.

  • Provide low-cost bridging to existing Ethernet and Wi-Fi devices.

  • Enable cloud services and connectivity to smartphones and tablets that promote ease of use and a common user experience for customers.

Achieving these goals will increase adoption rates and user acceptance for IoT devices in the Connected Home.

A common challenge in the IoT is managing devices requiring low power consumption, such as battery-powered devices where long battery life is essential. To meet this challenge, Silicon Labs has developed the Silicon Labs Connect stack. Connect provides a fully-featured, easily customizable wireless networking solution optimized for devices that require low power consumption and are used in a simple network topology. Connect is configurable to be compliant with regional communications standards worldwide. Each RF configuration is designed for maximum performance under each regional standard.

The Silicon Labs Connect stack supports many combinations of radio modulation, frequency, and data rates. The stack provides support for end nodes, coordinators, and range extenders. It includes all wireless MAC (Medium Access Control) layer functions such as scanning and joining, setting up a point-to-point or star network, and managing device types such as sleepy end devices, routers, and coordinators. With all this functionality already implemented in the stack, users can focus on their end application development and not worry about the lower-level radio and network details.

The Connect stack should be used in applications with simple network topologies, such as a set of data readers feeding information directly to a single central collection point (star or extended star topology), or a set of nodes in the same range exchanging data in a single-hop fashion (direct devices or MAC devices). It does not provide a full mesh networking solution such as that provided by the EmberZNet PRO or Silicon Labs Thread stacks.

The Connect stack is part of the Silicon Labs Flex SDK (Software Development Kit), installed through Simplicity Studio. Connect runs on top of RAIL (Radio Abstraction Interface Layer), also included with the Flex SDK. RAIL provides an intuitive, easily-customizable radio interface layer that is designed to support proprietary or standards-based wireless protocols. For more information, see RAIL Fundamentals.

The Connect stack supports efficient application development through its "building block" plug-in design. When used with the Simplicity Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment), developers can easily select the functions that should be included in the application. The resulting applications are completely portable, in that they can be recompiled for different regions and EFR32 devices.