Amazon Sidewalk in 2026: Platform Evolution, New Use Cases, and What Comes Next

Hello everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us today for this Silicon Labs Tech Talk on the continued evolution of Amazon Sidewalk and the opportunities it's enabling in 2026 and beyond. My name is Jeremy Stacy, and I am the product marketing manager at Silicon Labs. I'll be moderating today's discussion and helping guide the conversation and Q&A. Before we get started, a quick note. Everyone attending today will have a chance to win a free Amazon Sidewalk development kit from Oxit. To be eligible, you'll need to stay on the call throughout and throughout the end of the session and participate in the Q&A. Additional terms and conditions apply, and those are available on the Silicon Labs webinar registration page.

We also have Amazon Sidewalk technical experts, Lucie Labadie, applications engineer from Silicon Labs, and Thomas Henley, a senior solutions architect from Amazon, on the call today. They will be in the background and help answer the technical questions during the webinar. In the end, we'll wrap up with a live Q&A featuring both Brent and Jay. So we encourage you to submit your questions as we go along. Today's discussion brings together two leaders who are deeply involved in shaping and enabling Amazon Sidewalk's ecosystem. I'm pleased to welcome Jay Desai, the general manager of Amazon Sidewalk. Jay leads Amazon Sidewalk's platform strategy and ecosystem, including the recent platform updates such as the location services and expanding the set of device types, and use cases we're seeing across the smart home, smart city, and industrial IoT.

Joining Jay today is Brent Corn from Silicon Labs. Brent works closely with device makers building Amazon Sidewalk's products and will share how Silicon Labs supports the full development journey from hardware and software to security, certification, and scalable deployment. To set the stage, we'll begin with a short video that provides an overview of what Amazon Sidewalk is and why it matters. Let's start with that brief introduction to Amazon Sidewalk. Introducing Ring Sensors, a new line of smart security sensors that lets you build your protection your way. It's security that works where you want it. No base stations, no Wi-Fi range limits, no worries. Detect, protect, and secure. You're covered inside, out to the edge of your property, and beyond.

And for extra peace of mind, add professional monitoring. We received a burglary alarm at your address. Do you want us to have the police check it out? Yes, please. Thank you. Amazon Sidewalk lets you go beyond your home's Wi-Fi range. It's a powerful community network formed by devices in the area. It covers approximately 95% of the country. So even when your power goes out, your Ring Sensors stay online. Works With all your Alexa and Ring devices. Easily arm your system right in the Ring app. The next evolution in home security is here. Ring Sensors. Security unleashed. Thank you, Jeremy. Great to be here for the first Tech Talk of the season. We're really super happy to have you here, Jay.

Especially thankful that you allow us to check out your headquarters and check out this great lab where you do all the customer testing. It's amazing to see how much work you guys do behind the scenes to make sure these products are consistent. Thanks for hosting us. Thanks for having me. So, let's jump right into it. So I thought we'd start with a little bit of context. a lot of our developers are very familiar with Sidewalk. It's been around for a while. You guys have been building out a lot of the hub and the background information, network. But really, to me, CES this year was kind of a reset moment. What it really signaled was a level of commitment from your department and also a commitment to Sidewalk.

Can you talk a little bit about what that is about? Yeah. So, last few years, the Amazon team has been working tirelessly on building out a network that is reliable, that can keep its promise. We have now 95% coverage. The network is ready. It is reliable. The few things that we were most focusing on was its range and coverage, so it should be a ubiquitous network that works everywhere in neighborhoods. Also, the latency, we want to make sure that use cases like home security or even safety are supported with low latency. And then we want to make sure that our battery-operated sensors last forever. So low power was another area of focus. And finally, privacy and security. We wanted to build a network that had all this goodness, but it had the privacy and all the security layers to protect our customers' information.

So that definitely is a level of commitment, I think, that shows really where Sidewalk is going. What kind of solution were you trying to solve? And this was a very deliberate choice from your perspective, to move away from other platforms onto devices running on Sidewalk. Yeah. So what we did at CES, first I want to highlight a few things we did at CES, and I'll go into why we chose Sidewalk over some of the other technologies that we have evaluated across Amazon. So at CES, what we did was we launched 15 plus sensors on the Sidewalk network that ranges from safety sensors, security sensors, and control sensors. So security includes glass breaking, motion detection. Safety includes air quality, humidity, water leak.

Control is smart lighting, switches, smart fan controls. So these are all the sensors that we launched at CES. All of these sensors are aligned with the broader mission of keeping the neighborhoods, the homes safe and secure, creating crime-free neighborhoods. So a lot of these sensors are exactly doing that in the house and in neighborhoods. One of the sensors that we launched this time also protects your automotive. So it's an automotive sensor that plugs into the OBD2 port and does things like disturbance detection, glass breaking, et cetera. So this is, again, an indication that Sidewalk is not restricted to home or neighborhoods, but also can support mobility use cases to protect your assets, including automobiles or bikes, et cetera.

The other thing that we are doing is also internationalizing Sidewalk. So what we announced at CES was our expansion into North America, Canada, Mexico in Q1 of this year. And then we will be following up with international locales, including Europe and UK, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia later part of the year. What also gives us a lot of confidence is the coverage that we have, and saw that in the video. We have a 95% plus coverage in US, and it continues to grow as our customers buy Ring and Echo devices. So the network continues to grow and become more robust. I like the car device that you mentioned, and the reason is because you made a conscious decision, obviously, to run these devices on Sidewalk only.

And yet, I think a lot of developers don't think through it as a backup solution or as an additional connectivity solution. So a lot of times, if you have a cellular product, for example, like a car telematics device, talk about how Sidewalk can help reduce those OPEX costs to be able to bounce back and forth and not necessarily have to rely on either one all the time. Yeah. So Sidewalk is powered by three different radio access technologies, the CSS, BLE, and FSK. And the reason we have done that is to provide flexibility to our developers who chooses longer range versus latency or longer battery life versus latency and so on and so forth. So we can create different profiles and provide the right radio access technology to meet the needs of the customer without the customer having to worry about when and where to fall back to.

I also wanted to touch upon the value addition or differentiation. You had asked earlier on why Sidewalk, and the first thing that I wanted to say is that it is a hubless architecture, and it's very unique. And that's one of the most unique offering compared to any other protocol out there. It truly doesn't require any hub. It has a very long range. CSS gives you a range over a mile. If you're in rural areas, it's actually several miles. So this is a lot more compared to any other smart home technologies that only cover a few feet or maybe a few meters. And these two combined, the hubless and long range, allows Sidewalk to continue to operate even during internet and power outages. And that's very powerful when it comes to security use cases as an example, when there's an intruder, cuts off your power line, but Sidewalk is still up and running.

And then most recently, we also launched a location accuracy service on Sidewalk. So if you combine all of this, the long range, the hubless architecture, and the location accuracy service, what we're able to do is create a very versatile IoT network that supports a variety of applications beyond just a smart home. But agriculture, medical, industrial IoT, automotive, and so on and so forth. So I'm glad you brought up the location services. We just launched that, of course, in January. And one of the unique things I think about that is the fact that AWS has kind of been sitting on the sidelines. It's really kind of the hidden gem of this discussion because location services is kind of the first version of that.

But when you talk about Sidewalk's ability to connect to the cloud really without a hub, like you already talked about, the AWS portion of that discussion, just starting with location services and all the other things that a customer can build on their existing AWS IoT Core infrastructure, is really kind of a unique part to this. So talk a little bit about the location services and that part of it. So, just like everything else in Amazon, we are very customer-obsessed. So what we've been doing is looking at pain points that developers have, that customers have. Instead of chasing the next best technology, what we have focused on is solving a real world problem. And that's how we have built Sidewalk.

So when it comes to location accuracy, what we realized the customer pain points were high cost, high power, latency issues. So what we want to do is solve all of the above. And what we built is a very unique offering that combines the power of BLE, Wi-Fi, and GNSS. So we can do a BLE scan and a Wi-Fi scan before we fall back to GNSS, and essentially providing a very competitive, a low cost, a low latency, low power location accuracy service. The thing that I do want to highlight, what we're doing is now this allows devices that don't have GPS or cellular do location accuracy. In a sense, we are creating a totally new class of location-aware devices that don't need GNSS or cellular, and thereby opening a variety of new asset tracking applications that could So there's a big cost reduction, obviously, in that about resolving in the cloud.

But I think there's also a feature benefit to that as well with some of the things that Ring is working on, whether it be finding a dog or all of those things. So talk a little bit about where you see that part of it going and the kind of nature of finding things that customers are looking for. Yeah. So the immediate benefit to Ring and our Amazon ecosystem is finding lost pets. At CES, we announced this AI feature, and that is very well received by customers. We're finding at least one lost pet every day. Wow. And this is where our location accuracy Sidewalk plays a big part. We can extend this to kids trackers. We can extend this to lost bike, automotive, any assets or loved ones that we want to protect.

So I think that's the immediate impact of how we'll start using location accuracy within our own Ring and Amazon ecosystem. But beyond that, as I was mentioning, what we are trying to do is enable this new class of devices, location-aware devices that build, that will open up a variety of asset tracking devices and applications. So since you brought up asset tracking, of course, most of these devices are really centered around the home, and CES obviously was a big launch of devices around the home. But there are little glimpses of kind of maybe where you see that vision going beyond that. Can you talk a little bit about where you see it going from smart cities or asset tracking, or where do you see this going in the longer term?

Yeah. So all the goodness I talked about earlier in terms of the longer range, the helpless architecture, the flexibility, the location accuracy services, if you put all of this together, essentially what we have created is a very, very versatile network or offering app that can support variety of use cases. For us as an Amazon devices or Ring ecosystem, our focus is home and neighborhood, and that's why you see a lot of the multi-sensors that are mostly focused in and around the home. But as far as the Sidewalk network offering for TP's and developers is concerned, what we are opening up is applications ranging from agriculture, medical, asset tracking, industrial IoT. Metering is actually a big industry.

We have TP partners that were using Sidewalk for installing sensors for the utility monitoring in areas where otherwise it was very hard to get to. We know in hills and where there are dense vegetation. So these are all the applications that are possible with Sidewalk. And so part of that also is the lack of the need for customer provision. So can you talk a little bit about, number one, the value that that brings, at least from a home perspective, with pulling data for devices where the customer doesn't necessarily have to connect it. And number two, the industrial portion in the long term, where you see that going, the ability to connect those devices without needing to provision. So I'll touch upon actually a broader aspect first for provisioning and extending it to how we are thinking about serving the TP community and the developers is providing a easy onboarding and seamless connectivity.

Our single objective is to allow all sort of developers and IoT applications to onboard their devices on Sidewalk as fast as possible and go to market as quickly as possible with high confidenceSo of course, one key area there is our provisioning. So the way that we are partnering with Silicon vendors such as SiLabs is doing a tight integration of our SDK into their Silicon platform. And so when these hardware modules integrated with Sidewalk SDK are delivered to the customers, basically what we're trying to do is create this magical experience that when they open the box and turn on the device, it just connects. It just works out of the box without putting heavy credentials and all that. So there's a lot of handshake happening between the endpoint and the AWS cloud for security.

But all of that is seamless to the customer. The device just magically connects to Sidewalk without any permission. So that's essentially what we are enabling for developers. Well, and this is the beauty of what we bring into it. All those things that you talk about are great, but they don't scale without the partnerships that you talked about. So from Silicon Labs perspective, number one, we have purpose-built devices from an Amazon Sidewalk perspective. So we have devices that are FSK only. We have devices that are BLE only. We have BLE and FSK devices. And we also have interactions with the CSS products that you talked about. So from a connectivity perspective, we have the ability to connect all of those different capabilities.

I think the other one is, you talked about it very early on, is the low-powered design. This is a really critical part of the discussion. These devices have to last a very long time and use really low power. So this is a critical part of what we work together on in making sure that the stack that you create and that we integrate matches with the low power capabilities. I think the security part you talked about as well, we were just talking about this at the beginning before we started here today, was the ability to make sure that these devices connect securely. And that's a really critical thing from Amazon's perspective. This is a really big deal, and it's obviously a big deal from Silicon Labs' perspective.

And then the final part that I think that would really help a lot of our developers out there is a complete developer journey. So a lot of folks may not even know this, but if you go to our website, there is a full developer journey, kind of a step-by-step, you do this, you do this, you do this, kits. And a lot of that work we've been working on for a very long time with you guys. Yeah. And our goal is to make that faster every day. Where I remember when I took on the GM role for Sidewalk, the whole onboarding process, or bringing up a new porting SDK on a new silicon was a few months. We brought that down to two weeks, and my goal is to bring that down even further. So the whole idea is by the time a customer picks the silicon solution integrated with Sidewalk SDK, the whole onboarding process should be super easy.

All they should be focusing on is building the customer-facing application. They shouldn't be worrying about the connectivity. They shouldn't be worrying about the network. They shouldn't be worrying about security. So making that journey seamless and you pointed out that step-by-step process that's on the website when they get SiLabs kit as an example. But it doesn't stop there. We also need to make sure that whole journey is fast. It's fast and it allows them to go to market very quickly. So you talked a little bit about the security. Let's dive into that a little bit more. So as this adoption grows, obviously the security and trust becomes an even bigger deal, especially as these solutions start scaling.

So how do our developers think about this from a security perspective as they scale these devices? So, in general, privacy and security is of utmost value to Amazon. Across all our offerings including Sidewalk, we take utmost care about our customers' privacy and security. So the security aspect is very well integrated into Sidewalk at every layer. For hardware, we have very stringent requirements. That includes secure boot, anti-rollback, and encryption capabilities. So these are very strict hardware requirements that we don't compromise on. And that's why we only work with a select few silicon partners who are able to meet those requirements. On the protocol side, we have several layers of encryption that provides rotating keys, and end-to-end encryption all the way from device to cloud.

So our goal is to provide enterprise level security to our developers and customers so they don't have to worry about investing time and their energy and money in building security and changing the protocol or optimizing it. None of that. All that is taken care of. And we've talked about this, that the IoT networks in particular have a lot of vulnerabilities and that's something that we are aware of and so we keep that in mind when we are designing Sidewalk, and it's exactly designed to prevent-All of these protocols that exist in the out head. Great. So let's spend some time on where you see this going in the future. So looking ahead, what do you see from a Sidewalk perspective as far as expansions?

What kind of developers or products do you want to see coming out? So, a few things that we are doing with Sidewalk. One is on the IoT side, we'll continue to roll out sensors that keeps your home and neighborhood safe and secured. So we'll continue to do that on one end. We will continue to expand our network beyond US and other locales to truly create this global IoT network. And that's how Sidewalk has been aspiring to scale and to your first question of what were we doing before CS, you're exactly doing this, is to build a network that can scale globally. And now that's what we are doing this year, and we are able to do that very rapidly because of all the foundational work that went into building Sidewalk.

The other thing that we are doing is we are making the network more performant, tightening the latency. That's why we are able to launch this glass breaking sensor that's directly connected to a rapid response or a panic button for aging in place, as an example, directly connected to the rapid response with very low latency. Some of the sensors, the outdoor sensors, last for several years, are super battery efficient. So we'll continue to make this network more performant. We'll continue to roll out new services like the location accuracy and make it more robust, more accurate over time. So we have a long roadmap just for location accuracy. We're not stopping at what we just launched in January.

We're going to be able to keep improving it across the parameters I mentioned earlier that are relevant and most important to the customers. So in a sense or in summary, our goal is to make the network more accessible and make it more performant without sacrificing on security and privacy. And allow all sort of developers to bring on their application on Sidewalk. Now, there are a few no-brainer use cases, connected devices already that have a better alternative. Mm-hmm. But in my opinion, there are so many unconnected devices and with the offering that we have, which is that provides easy onboarding, fast onboarding, very ultra low cost solution. And with all the AI insights from AWS, there's a lot of unconnected things now that can also be connected.

So we are opening up new class of applications and new class of devices over the next few years. I think that's a really interesting point because the way I view Sidewalk is there are a lot of different protocols and platforms out there, and they're all great, and they all have individual use cases. To me, this one's unique because it actually connects to the cloud, as opposed to having, let's say, maybe Wi-Fi, nothing wrong with it, but it has its own use case, but Wi-Fi connecting or whatever protocol that you have, maybe it is connected to above. This one is actually cloud native. In other words, it actually connects to the cloud. And I think one of the really unique things about that from the developer's perspective is if they've already built out a back end on the cloud, this is just a connectivity method to that.

So all of the work that they've already built, maybe it's a Wi-Fi device or maybe it's a Blue... Whatever type of device it is, all of that can be repurposed and reused. This is just connection to that cloud. Absolutely. It's as simple as connecting two clouds. You're absolutely right. The other thing I think that we run across a lot that I don't think people think of a lot, you mentioned the fires already, the BLE, FSK, CSS. So BLE I think is a huge use case, and I think FSK to some degree as well. We have a lot of customers with a lot of products that are built on BLE or FSK. Mm-hmm. That's a pretty easy add there. I know I'm oversimplifying for all the developers out there, but to already have a product that connects that way and to just add cloud connectivity to that device is a really small step.

So I think a lot of times we think of these devices as, I have to add a new chip, I have to add all of this stuff. But realistically, the base is already there. They can take existing devices. This is just a way for them to connect to the cloud and now have those devices and start getting information back. Can you talk a little bit about the existing, it's really a very massive blue ocean out there. I think that's a great point. So far everything that we talked about was actually building, examples we talked about was building Sidewalk from scratch, which is picking the right silicon partner, taking the module, and with integrated SDK. But what you bring, the point that you highlight is also very critical that this could be as simple as a software update.

So you already have a silicon. Of course, it has to meet the stringent hardware and security requirements I talked about. But as long as it does, then it's a simple software upgrade of putting in the Sidewalk SDK and having a direct connectivity to the cloud. What devices, just out of curiosity, are you most excited about, or what use cases are you most excited? We obviously talk about security, and we talked about kind of smart cities, and we talked about how it's going to expand. Is there anything in particular that you look at and go, "I really like this. I think this is cool." It's not a single device, but what I'm most excited about is the magical experience that these devices can create when they start talking to each other, of course, at the cloud.

Because if you think about it, one example I can give you is let's say in a home setting, you have a water leak sensor, you have a motion detection sensor. Now, if these magically talk to each other and get the job done. So, one of the demos that we did at CES with our water leak sensor was, this sensor is somewhere in, they would call in the house, let's say basement, where it is harder for many of our connectivity to provide coverage. We had no issues with coverage, obviously. But more than that, when the leak happened, you got a notification saying, "Oh, we've detected a leak in your basement. By the way, these are the top three plumbers in your area. And I can see your calendar is open for tomorrow noon.

Do you want me to set up an appointment?" Now, that is magical. So what I'm most excited about is not only making the homes and neighborhoods and cities safer, but also making them smarter. And it wouldn't have been possible a few years ago without large data and AI capabilities. And now we have all of that. And that's why that simplicity of your device able to connect to the cloud and get all the goodness is going to be super powerful. I think that's a really interesting point. I want to talk about that for a second. So obviously, Amazon's direction is heading that way. You talk about Alexa Plus, and Silicon Labs is heading that way as well with AI capabilities built on chips. So it's an interesting dynamic because we talk about cloud use, and yet a lot of customers, and even Amazon to some degree, would say, "We want as much edge computing as capable as well," because you've got long-term needs of keeping the cloud open and do more sensing, at least locally.

So talk a little bit about from an AI perspective, where you see the value of that, and then also the expansion of the Ring app, the ability to add additional capabilities there as well. So, just recently, since CES, Ring has been announcing a lot of AI features. One is finding a lost pet through the Neighbor app. The other one is detecting fires. I think that's super powerful. Our Ring CEO, Jamie, came and talked about it, and it was very personal to him because he was impacted with the Palisades fire. So this new AI service is very, very powerful. It's going to be very helpful to a lot of people in the future. And then the smart video description is something that we had launched, I think, late last year.

And it's, again, taking simple things and making it more descriptive where I have smart video description on my Ring app. So what happens is when-- And of course, I can play around with the setting on what kind of notifications I want versus not, but I get exact notification. You have somebody at your door that I don't recognize versus if it's my wife, it won't give me a notification because these are familiar faces. So there's so much intelligence that we can do with AI, and the examples I'm giving you right now are all vision related, but you can also do the same thing with non-vision related, with our sidewalk sensors, or this immense amount of data that we'll be sending from your home, and all that is going to help in making the homes a lot more proactive because now you have a motion detector.

It knows that it's you coming in from work at 6:00 p. m., and that's when you want to turn on certain lights. You want to set a few settings in the home, like temperature control, et cetera. So all of this proactive behavior is possible through AI insights. But how do you get AI insights without data? And these are the sensors that sends all this data. And earlier, these were very task-specific settings that only did one thing, and just that one thing. This faucet is open or it's closed, or this is hot or cold. But now with insights, you can do a lot more intelligent things that make your surrounding more proactive. So I'd be remiss if we had a lot of developers obviously on, and we didn't talk about maybe some of the ways that we can ease their journey.

So I think from our perspective, we like to see, number one, customers use the developer journey. I think it's a really great way to access a lot of the informationI think also development kits, ordering a development kit, starting to play around with the product. What do you see some of the things from your perspective that make it easier, like certification or test modes, to be able to download digital certificates and test the product and get it up and running? What do you see some of the things that reduce that friction that we talked about earlier? So yeah, the way I see it is that our customers and developers should not be spending even one second worrying about security or network connectivity.

I think, between the Silicon partner and the Sidewalk team, all that should be delivered. And the only time they should be spending is on building the customer level application. So I want to go one step further where working with partners like yourself, we also provide sample application course. Because I worked with a lot of developers that have a brilliant idea, they want to bring it to market, but they don't have the right skill set. They haven't done it before. So how do we enable them to go to market quickly? It's a brilliant idea. They have the channel, all of that. So by providing the sample application code where and then you talked about AI agent on Wi-Fi. So if now through agentic AI, where they could, it takes them a day or two days to build that application on top of our protocol that allows them to connect to the cloud and get all the intelligence.

I think that's magical. So if you can imagine, if you're an entrepreneur, you have a great idea, and you want to test it out, and you want to be able to go to the market in, let's say in a few months because you have this idea with the use of AI that you're offering, you're able to build that application code in matter of few days. All you do is one build because it's all pre-certified. The model works because it's pre-certified. It's secured. So they go, they do one build with their plastic enclosure and ship it to market. I think that would be brilliant, right? What that will do is that will create a lot of new products and services for our customers. I think this is also where partners can come in to help shorten that as well, whether it be a partner developing on the IoT side or a partner on the AWS side- Yeah... helping to get build out the backend cloud.

I think there's a massive opportunity for people like what you talked about, an inventor, an entrepreneur that wants to make a device that's connected and really doesn't understand how to do that. So whether it's utilizing the developer journey or utilizing partners or utilizing AWS partners as well, that's a great capability for them to build out. So on a high level, let's close out. I think from the developer's point of view, I think they're probably asking, what direction should I go, and why should I use Sidewalk? So just really on a high level, let's talk a little bit as we close out about the connectivity capability and security capabilities. You talked about de-risking these devices to be able to get them launched fast.

Yeah. What I would say is if you're looking for a robust and reliable solution that works at long range, where you don't have to worry about installing hubs and infrastructure. You don't have to worry about changing the connectivity layers or networking and connecting to the cloud. You want that simplicity. You want the reliability. You want that long range. You want that hubless architecture. And on top of that, you want the location accuracy service, then Sidewalk is the right fit for you. And Silicon Labs obviously as well. Yes, of course.