I was at the airport recently, tumbling through a myriad of magazines while waiting for my flight. From Dwell to WIRED, seemingly every publication had articles talking about smart homes. The proliferation and fast growth of home automation and connected lighting applications is astonishing....and it's just the beginning.

Lee Ratliff, principal analyst for connectivity and IoT at IHS Technology, forecasted that connected home device shipments will grow from 59 million units in 2015 to 193 million units in 2018, a compounded annual growth rate of more than 48 percent.

According to Ratliff, to stand out from the rest, successful connected home products must be:

• standards-based
• easy to deploy by mainstream consumers
• designed to work in real-world environments
• able to solve specific problems with minimal complexity

While that's clear, adding wireless connectivity to home devices is not as simple as it seems. Therefore, Greg Hodgson, senior director of IoT Solutions here at Silicon Labs, worked with his team to help minimize the complexity. His mission: make wireless design faster and easier so that developers can create simple, high-performing, battery-friendly devices. To that end, we just released new connected lighting, home automation and ZigBee gateway reference designs.

This launch is the first in a series of turnkey IoT solutions from our company. The new reference designs include the hardware, firmware and software tools that you need to create interoperable, scalable, feature-rich connected home products. These cost-effective designs will significantly reduce the complexity of connecting ZigBee devices, such as lights, dimmer switches and door/window contact sensors, in a connected home network. 

To order the references designs and for additional information, please visit www.silabs.com/connectedhome.