Overview
Smart Home Sensors Overview
Smart sensors, those small, unnoticeable devices, have a critical role in making homes smarter. They detect fire, water leakage, and intrusion, then send an alert over the wireless link as quickly as possible - every second counts in time-sensitive emergencies. Accurate connected sensors can save time and lives, protect property, and give peace of mind to users. On the other hand, temperature and humidity sensors are crucial for home energy optimization, helping homeowners to enhance living comfort, reduce energy costs, and minimize environmental impact. The smart sensors market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19 percent until 2026, making it one of the most lucrative smart home segments.
Silicon Labs Wireless Solutions for Smart Home Sensors
Silicon Labs provides IoT device makers with the most energy-efficient wireless solutions for Smart Sensors. Our portfolio covers all wireless protocols: Wi-Fi, Thread, Bluetooth, Matter, Amazon Sidewalk, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Proprietary. The SoCs can enable your sensors with up to 10 years of coin cell battery life while delivering high-performance connectivity. Our Secure Vault, the most advanced IoT security solution, is certified up to the highest PSA Level 3, ensuring your sensors won’t be the weakest link in smart home security.
Designing Smart Home Sensors
What should you consider when designing wireless, energy-efficient, and secure smart sensors? Careful consideration must be given to battery life, including chemistry, voltage, capacity, size, range and link margin, network topology, one-way vs. two-way RF, ease of commissioning, and anti-jamming agility, to name a few. Here’s a rundown of our top design considerations.
Which Wireless Protocol to Choose for Your Smart Sensors?
Every home is a unique RF challenge for the designers of smart sensors. The devices must be placed in specific locations, regardless of walls, reflections, and dead spots. Silicon Labs offers high-performance, long-range wireless solutions for all protocols you need in smart sensors: Wi-Fi, Thread, Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth mesh, Matter, Amazon Sidewalk, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Proprietary.
How to Increase Battery life on Smart Sensors?
Battery life is one of the most crucial features for size- and resource-constrained sensors. It depends on many aspects, such as transmit power, receiver sensitivity, data rate, range, node count, and battery capacity. Silicon Labs' wireless portfolio is renowned for delivering the lowest energy consumption for any IoT protocol.
- The SiWx917 is the lowest-power Wi-Fi 6 SoC in the market.
- Our xG28 Sub-GHz SoCs can deliver up to 10-year coin cell battery life for Z-Wave and Proprietary protocols.
- Exceptional RX sensitivity of BG22, BG27, and MG27 ultra-low-power SoCs improves signal reception, reducing TX power on the sender and thus increasing battery life for Bluetooth mesh and Zigbee Green Power sensors.
- The Energy Profiler tool on Simplicity Studio helps you to optimize your code line-by-line to minimize energy consumption on your sensors.
- Application Notes to help developers minimize energy consumption for Bluetooth LE use cases.
- SoCs, with integrated DC-to-DC converters such as BG27 and MG27, extract maximum energy from the battery.
Smart Home Sensors & Security
Smart sensors may encounter many cyber-attacks during their lifetime. How to ensure your sensors won’t be the weakest link in smart home security? Our Secure Vault is the most advanced IoT security solution with up to PSA Certification Level 3 grading.
How to Connect Sensors to Popular Smart Home Ecosystems?
How can you quickly integrate your sensors into popular smart home ecosystems such as Amazon, Apple, and Google? The new Matter 1.1 specification enables the integration of sleepy end-nodes i.e. sensors in smart home ecosystems. Silicon Labs provides a complete Matter development solution with the most energy-efficient and secure single-chip solutions for Matter over Wi-Fi and Thread!
How to Simplify Commissioning of New Sensors?
Silicon Labs offers several solutions for enabling easy commissioning on smart home sensors. In Z-Wave, sensors can use SmartStart Commissioning to create and deploy networks easily using QR codes. Bluetooth Low Energy co-existence with protocols such as Matter, Wi-Fi, Thread, and Zigbee enables easy smartphone setup for user-friendly DIY sensor solutions!
How to Bridge Z-Wave and 802.15.4 Sensors to Matter?
Matter Bridge is a standard functionality allowing you to connect your sensors using protocols such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Proprietary to Matter. However, it requires time-consuming multi-protocol software development on the gateway. Silicon Labs Unify SDK simplifies multi-protocol SW development, reducing costs and time-to-market.
How to Accelerate Time-to-Market for Smart Sensors?
Wireless design for sensors is time-consuming due to various RF regulations. Silicon Labs offers wireless modules (e.g. ZGM230S) with worldwide RF certifications to save up to 9 months from your time-to-market, reducing your development costs, accelerating time to break even, and increasing return on investment.
Smart Home Sensor Block Diagram
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