Navigating Matter Certification: What’s Changed and How to Succeed

Hello, everyone. Welcome.   

Thank you for joining us. I'm Jeremy Stacy, and today we're talking about Matter certification and what's changed recently, and what you need to know to get your product through the process smoothly. If you've certified a Matter product before, some of this will look different than it did even a year ago. And if you're just getting started, we'll walk you through the entire path. Either way, by the end of the session, you'll know exactly where things stand as of Matter 1.6. And some quick introductions here.   

So again, I'm Jeremy Stacy. I'm the product marketing manager here at Silicon Labs, and Rob Alexander is here with me. He is our principal product manager and member of the board at the CSA. He spends a lot of time navigating this process exactly, and so today's talk is really built about his background and knowledge of the topics.   

So let's get started. Certification then and now, and I'll pass it over to Rob. Thank you so much, Jeremy.   

All right. Should be able to now control slides.   

So yeah, I'm going to talk a bit about Matter certification. Yeah, some people might have some ideas of how it used to work, and I think there are cases where it's been the same, but the CSA has really tried a lot to improve Matter certification. One of the roles I have within the Connectivity Standards Alliance is the Test and Certification Oversight Committee. I'm a member of that, and we constantly are trying to improve things. So I'll talk through a bit of what's going on.   

All right. So just a quick recap.   

So Matter really hasn't launched that long ago. It's barely been four years. It launched in October of 2022. It had a single full end product certification path, where the stack and the application, and the full device were all certified at the same time. Since then, the Connectivity Standards Alliance has layered in a lot of other pieces here. They now have a platform-level certification for just the stack. They've added a fast-track recertification process, and really trying to expand the self-testing tools and improve them as much as possible. Over the years, we've had 1,000 certified products by Matter 1.3 in April of 2024, and we continue to add devices at the ecosystem level, and coverage overall. And we've been steadily releasing at least a couple of versions a thread-local storage year from 1.4 to 1.5 to 1.6. And now, as of early 2026, there are 3,000 certified devices according to Matter Alpha.   

So fantastic progress. We continue to see a lot of uptick here. And the goals on the certification front are always to provide better ways to pull an SDK from the GitHub repo and get going on product development as soon as possible, and bring that all the way into an actual finished, plastics and device from manufacturing.   

Just wanted to kind of recap a little bit on the vision of Matter. It really wants to address three major groups to improve the IoT.   

First and foremost, developers, the faster and more easily developers can develop products. This goes to reducing the ecosystem-specific SKUs and products that people used to have to develop. It provides a broader range of the community support. The Connectivity Standards Alliance has a really great set of Slack channels where product vendors can work with other product vendors with the ecosystems directly, and it allows for you to spend more time on the innovation and less on figuring out how the wireless technology works.   

Retailers, of course, need to explain a ton of products and with Matter, it helps reduce that to saying, "Okay, this is a Matter product. It works with all of these other products that have that share the same logo," and it isn't a specific vendor logo or program. It is universal to all of these devices. And hopefully, that will minimize the number of returns and just simplify the experience for customers.   

And then finally, of course, consumers, they want a simple purchasing experience, simple setup and control. They want to see the logo. They'll know it works with what they've got. They want to see a QR code because they really understand, okay, I scan that and I get going. And they want it to work with smart assistants, with their phone. Sometimes those are different, and all of that really is some of the goal of making Matter better and making the IoT experience really easy for everyone.   

So as of 2026, by my count, we have 82 device types in total. This includes quite a broad range of devices from the very expected lighting and plugs and bulbs and switches to media devices, allowing you to control your streams, redirect them. It allows you to get now cameras so that you can have a stream directed not only to your provider of choice, but also potentially stream the camera feed to your TV. We, of course, have appliances and locks and shades, and a whole lot of good device types, all having been approved and certifiable. And even some of the neat ones that are still available today but are being worked on are ambient presence detection. That allows you to have devices that could be both a primary device as well as giving you ambient sensing capabilities to detect things in the home.   

All right. So this is where we get into the meat of things, really.   It's important to remember that Matter is a protocol, but it's also an SDK, and it's also a certification program administered by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the CSA. So we hardly encourage if you're even thinking about it, it's worthwhile to join the Connectivity Standards Alliance, and potentially these other alliances if you're looking at those technologies to make sure you get through that, and get more information. They put a lot of information on their public websites, but it's important that you join them. They will have certification fees and other joining requirements that you'll need to go through.   

So CSA is the sort of umbrella for a lot of that. However, a thread group is a separate group, they're a separate organization, and they have their own requirements now. The benefit is for a lot of cases, if you have a system on chip device, you can then have that, and make use of inheritance, which means a number of different manufacturers, including Silicon Labs, have pre-certified libraries. You go to the thread group and saying, "I'm using the certified libraries." You skip the testing. You are still paying for and joining the thread group, but you don't need to use the ATL's to then formally do testing. You'll be certified by inheritance. You have a similar state in the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth groups. There is not a separate certification needed for Wi-Fi unless you want to use the logo. For Bluetooth, again, you can use the pre-certified Silicon Lab stack and qualified components, and then it's a paperwork exercise to be certified by Bluetooth. But you do need to be certified for Bluetooth when you're using that. Lastly, there's sort of an optional and free ecosystem certification. This is something that is built and run by the Connectivity Standards Alliance. They have all these ecosystems, including the big four, but more are also part of that Interop lab, and it allows them to Test your product against a multitude of other things in a very formal environment. And it's something you can, and I recommend people do on their own. But the CSA has a nice comprehensive flow and a comprehensive set of devices there. And it's a great way to help ensure that your product will be interoperable. New products, you should be developing on at least that Matter 1.4. Earlier programs are closed for initial certifications. If you have an older product and you want to recertify, you're always welcome to recertify against those older versions.   

All right. Here's the sort of end journey. You want to first and foremost define the Matter end product you're going to be building.   

So taking your existing IoT design, figuring out how it maps to Matter, looking at the specifications, using AI where you can, to help you navigate that, but also leveraging other members in the community, such as Silicon Labs. And as we've mentioned, they've got a great Slack channel in the CSA to help figure out what you want to target, who are the most important other products you want to work with, and figure out the commissioning methods you want. There's a bunch of them. Next, as you get farther along, you'll want to figure out, you want to build a Matter over Thread or Matter over Wi-Fi device. Hopefully, you already have some ideas of that product and where it best fits, and you'll want to work on your path to certifying the network transport. As mentioned, there's a lot of enhancements here that allow inheritance, so that you don't have to do additional testing there. But those products, and those transports are key in order to finally getting your certification. Step three, you'll want to establish your end product readiness. That means implementing it in all your code and all your custom hardware, provisioning and validating the Matter product.   

It's important to understand how the test cases and the PICS all factor in. Ultimately, there's a test harness, and it is fed by what is called PICS, which are the Protocol Independent Implementation Conformity Standard. It's an IEEE thing that's come up. In essence, it defines what is your product at a very low level, very specific details to your attributes, and then thus drives the test cases that you will have to run. We, of course, have in Matter what's called DACs, device certificates, and they are very important. You will need to provision in your manufacturing line, the DACs, and most importantly, the private keys, as well as some other certification elements, such as the Matter passcode, which correlates the QR code. You'll want to verify commissioning through that whole process as you get closer to manufacturing and verify the interoperability and some of the other aspects there. One of the keys here is joining the CSA membership. I definitely recommend trying to do that as soon as possible, especially if you're a bigger company. There are some legal considerations that your company may have to look through and understand before joining. But once you've joined, you can get your Matter certification IDs. They're specific to your manufacturer IDs, or sorry, specific to your company, and thus identify your product. You'll want to make sure that you've selected an authorized test house. They will be the ones that are required to do your initial certification. Make sure you can get on their schedule, you figure out what they will need from you, and arrange that situation.   

And then eventually you will go through the CSA approval, and get the final bit of paperwork from the CSA and get things like your digital certificates. After all that, of course, you could do Works With Testing, should you want. And that's something that you can actually do earlier in the process as well. There is some flexibility there, and we'll talk a bit more about that. Okay, so big changes in the CSA certification program has happened since the last couple of years. Recertification.   

So recertification is definitely something that you will do after you get through initial certification, but it's also something that we've seen happen before you launch your product. And that's because you may well find bugs or other fixes that you want to make sure is put into your manufacturing line so the customer's out-of-box experience is the best, and you can make sure that they have the best experience. And as you make changes, you do need to, depending on the specific elements of the change, you will need to go back and recertify your product. And so we've had a number of instances where companies that are certifying for a new launch also gain fast-track permission, and they are authorized for fast-track recertification. And that makes your move towards manufacturing so much easier. Fast-track recertification basically means that you can run the test harness on your own. You have authorized individuals in your company that know how to use the test harness, that are authorized by the Connectivity Standards Alliance to do that, and they keep the ATL logs, so that they can be reviewed should there need to be an audit or anything like that. Very similar to that is rapid recertification. The main difference is that an ATL still reviews the logs on your behalf. Both of those programs are things that you may want to sign up for. There's training for those programs normally held at the CSA member events but also through the test houses themselves. They offer training in these areas. And this will cut major time off your recertifications, which if you have a critical bug, it's security, it's not related to Matter, you want to roll it out as fast as possible. And the CSA wants you to do that too, so this enables that. Matter Compliant Software Platform certification was just launched late last year. This allows the Silicon vendors, such as Silicon Labs, to certify hardware in an SDK combination. Very similar to what we do for Zigbee compliant platforms today. The commissioning, the networking, and the security are all pre-validated, and it shrinks the number of test cases you have, thus shrinking the time and the expense at the test house.   

All right. I'm going to go into some of the details of the certification tools from the Alliance.   So the main certification tool that you will interface with is the one that manages test plans and submissions. It uses a tool called NAC, which is the platform that the CSA manages. It's a portal. You log in, you see the state of your certification submissions, whether you need to provide more documentation, whether you need to provide or whether you're waiting on the CSA staff to provide you some feedback, and all that stuff. The next is the PICS tool, which is called the Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement. Essentially, it is the very detailed document that you will fill out that allows them to know exactly what attributes, exactly what clusters and all that stuff of the Matter that you've implemented. This is a web tool that ultimately creates these documents, these XML documents that are a lot more formal. It allows you to pick through a lot of these pieces and we can help you as Silicon Labs to help understand how to fill them out, but also the CSA will assist you as well. The main Matter test harness is also affectionately known as chipTool. It's a command line interface with a bunch of scripts on top and a GUI as well to help manage it. This automates conformance testing against the specification. You can run this on your own. It's free from the CSA. You can run it multiple times. We highly encourage you run it ahead of time. You can run it with Silicon Labs demo equipment to get a sense for that. And you can run it later in your product development cycle. You should definitely run it and try to get a clean run through it before you send to the test lab, thereby making it easier to go through that process.   

And then lastly, we have the last couple items, Interoperability Testing Facility. Again, this is an Interop lab located in Portland, Oregon, run by the Connectivity Standards Alliance. It helps do some more real-world testing against the ecosystems, real mobile phones, real voice assistants, other products that you may be paired with, such as other switches from other manufacturers, if you're a light bulb and that sort of thing. You can set up, again, some of this stuff on your own, but it is available free to members. There is a queue that you will need to make sure that you get in the line for, but again, I highly recommend to run this. It's a great benefit of the CSA. And lastly, there's a distributed compliance ledger. Effectively, this is a public record with the list of certified product IDs and vendor IDs. All of them are in this ledger allowing you to be listed as a authorized and authentic certified device. The benefit is that this helps reduce counterfeits or other attempts to trade on your brand. And the ecosystems helps to facilitate this by checking against that so that your users will know, yes, you are authentic device from your company.   

All right. Quickly, I'm going to talk a little bit about the certification updates, and then I will pass it over to Jeremy. There's been a lot going on. I won't go through everything in detail, but suffice it to say, Matter keeps adding device types and keeps adding new features.   

So Matter 1.4 was launched in November of 2024. The big thing was enhanced multi-admin and setup flow. This is perhaps the less exciting in terms of new features, but it was very important for a number of companies that wanted to display their terms and conditions to the end user, but still use Matter for commissioning.   

So that was very important to a number of companies. Multi-admin allows for easier sharing of devices across them.   

So essentially you could say, "Hey, I have 10 devices and I want to share them with this smart assistant that is not the same as my smartphone maker." And that can be done more easily instead of doing them one at a time. There was a bunch of changes for Thread 1.4 to enhance border routers to make it easier to manage them. Big improvements that we've been working on quite a bit since Matter launched are what we call intermittently connected devices or ICDs, essentially low-power sleepy devices. And this is a great way to manage those devices so that they're still connective and responsive, but they are maximizing their power and thus lengthening the battery life. There was also some improvements for certification revocation, and Matter 1.4.1 and 4.2 also followed on from that. 1.5 big tentpole feature was cameras. This allowed them to define how the camera is sort of administered. It's still using standard RTP and a bunch of other protocols for streaming the data, but allows you to manage the camera in a way that you could redirect the streams, you could commission them into any ecosystem as well. And it continued on for low power and battery life optimizations as well.   

And then lastly, 1.6 just released. No new device categories in this particular one, but had a bunch of changes, including something called Joint Fabric. This is a concept where rather than just keep recommissioning your device onto the multiple ecosystems for phones or smart assistants, you could actually have a single fabric with a single set of rules, a single set of automations, and that sort of thing, and other ecosystems could share that. There was also a big one, which was thermostat suggestions. This, in essence, is what you kind of expect. But it's not really how Matter worked prior to this, which is rather than have a bunch of devices that are setting the exact set point of the thermostat, you could have ways of suggesting the thermostat make a change.   

So the key, of course, is we may have energy providers that want to change your thermostat settings for energy programs you've enrolled in, but then you also may want to have ways to say, "Well, wait a minute, I just don't feel comfortable." I really am, whatever is the reason, maybe I am expecting lots of guests. Maybe I have other things in the system that are feeding into the thermostat. I don't want those two things to fight on setting thermostat settings. I want them to suggest changes, and then the thermostat can help sort that out intelligently.   

And then last things, they've done a lot of enhancements to the way devices report and security sensors manage their history. And the last big change was NFC-based commissioning as an alternative to Bluetooth.   

All right. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy to talk about how Silicon Labs helps you simplify certification.   

Thank you, Rob. That was a very nice presentation.   

Silicon Labs simplifying the certification.   

So how do we do that? How do we simplify Matter development, testing, and manufacturing for you? We start off with a guided end-to-end Matter developer journey, and this steps the developers through the learning to deployment and includes the guidance for the different ecosystems. Our apps teams that we have internally, they are very knowledgeable about the process through the different ecosystems, and they can help you out with your questions. Beyond that, we go into the high performance, low power wireless. We have both Wi-Fi and thread solutions. They also include BLE for the commissioning. And if you're looking for the Matter Wi-Fi SoCs that we have available for use, you can go to the website and from the products dropdown, you select Matter, and you'll have the full list of all of our Matter-compatible products that we offer. From the wireless Matter solution, we have the GitHub, as Rob mentioned, the Simplicity Studio, and proven and pre-certified stacks for Matter over Wi-Fi and Matter over Thread.   

So these help you get your product certified because you don't have to do this low-level certification for the wireless. From the comprehensive development tools, we have development kits, we have full kits, we have tools, we have sample applications to get your application kicked off, and for multiple Matter use cases.  

Robust Matter compliance security.   Silicon Labs has one of the most advanced IoT security solutions and full Matter compliance when it comes to the security.   

So we're offering your devices increased security for your Matter-certified products.   

Silicon Labs custom manufacturing service. This is something that I'm going to go into a little bit further on another slide up ahead, but basically, it's the secure programming of the Matter DAC certificates, the security parameters, your application, and bootloader.   

So setting all of that stuff before your product goes to the contract manufacturer.   

And then finally, important for CSA and Matter here is that we have the certified Matter-compliant platform. It inherits its pre-tested commissioning, networking, and security to reduce your certification efforts and accelerate your product launches.   

So overall, the big picture, Silicon Labs Matter solutions, it's more than just silicon. It's a combination of the hardware, the software, the tools, and the certification assistance that we have. Whether it's the full stack software support, the advanced development hardware reference designs and tools, the ease of use through Simplicity Studio and the SI SDK integration Or then on the certification side, the inheritance of the Thread and Wi-Fi stacks, or the proven Matter certifications that we have helped our customers get their products certified. And on top of that, the ecosystem certifications.   

So as I said, the CPMS, I wanted to talk to you a little bit more here. There's a few different items here on the Matter security elements that are included in secure vault and the CPMS process. At the top, we have the device, the DAC.   

So that's the certificate that you get from Matter, and it's installed at the factory by the manufacturer. It proves that the device is authentic, proves the device is Matter certified.   

And then you have the operational certificate, which is generated at the time when the device actually joins the Matter fabric. It's used to authenticate that the device is real and that it's able to be on the Matter network.   

And then the CASE, the certificate authenticated session establishment. This is used to establish symmetric keys between the two different Matter devices so that they can communicate securely between each other.   

And finally, we have the secure boot, which basically it's only allowing manufacturer authenticated software images to be uploaded onto the device, as in through encrypted software upgrades, and has upgraded bootloader to protect against future attacks. And if we look over here on the right-hand side, how Silicon Labs protection fits and where it benefits the manufacturer.   

So the secure vault creates the private public DAC key in the chip at manufacturing time and stores the private key encrypted so that it's not open and freely accessible. The CPMS also has the DAC injected, and what this does is it protects against cloning of your device or stealing from your brand. For the operational certificate, these private keys, they're stored inside of the secure element, and they're not exportable.   

So what this does is it protects against taking control of the device from externally.   

For the CASE, so the ephemeral private key for CASE is generated inside a vault, and it's not exportable as well.   So this protects against impersonating devices trying to take control on the Matter fabric.   

So if some other device wants to get in to the Matter fabric and try to pretend to be your device, this protects against that.   

And finally, the secure boot. So the secure vault is a ROM-based bootloader. The bootloader keys are encrypted and stored, non-exportable again, and CPMS can intake or wrap the bootloader and the over-the-air decryption keys, preload the secure bootloader. And what this does, it ensures that your signed encrypted code ever runs on the device, that only your signed encrypted code ever runs on the device. And so what does all of this do? Basically, it's reducing the risk and accelerating the time to certification.   

Silicon Labs has an extensive history working with the CSA and Thread groups.   

So we have the pre-certified testing, the open Thread certification libraries, the component in Simplicity Studio V6 lets the teams self-test before the ATL submission. And as Rob mentioned earlier, that is something that helps you to ensure that you're going to pass the certification for the ATL submission. Two certification paths supported, the single product test at an ATL and SVE, or the product family certification for the different design variants.   

And then the reference designs, dev kits, pre-built demo apps. These all shorten the path from the evaluation to submission ready for the device. Inheritance from Silicon Labs certified Thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth stacks, these all reduce the redundant testing at the transport layer.   

And finally, I would like to summarize, so let's bring it all together.   

Going back to what Rob was talking about, the Matter certification has matured a lot since the 1.0 release in 2022. And there's the platform certification, the fast track recertification. They now generally reduce both cost and time to market.   

Matter 1.6 released this past June. It's about the setup. It's about the multi-ecosystem management and the context-aware control, rather than new device categories.   

So in NFC commissioning, joint fabric, and the thermostat suggestions, they all bring new capabilities, and each of these brings its own certification considerations to plan for.   

And finally, the Silicon Labs certified platform, updated SDK, and pre-certification tooling are all built to help you move from evaluation to certified product.   

Thank you so much, Jeremy. One other thing we didn't get a chance to talk about before we jump into the Q&A.   

So the CSA is continually trying to improve certification. Just yesterday, they made some changes. I'll talk a little bit about them. We didn't have any slides because they're just so hot off the press. But in essence, they made changes to the way that modules can now make use of the certification transfer program, allowing pre-certified modules to then be transferred and be used in other families. Really great change there. And the other one is that some companies choose to use third parties to shepherd their certification of their product through the certification process for various reasons, and they've made that easier as well. Should you want to make use of those companies, they are now going to have easier time working with the CSA.   

So lots of great changes, and as part of the CSA, Silicon Labs is always wanting to hear feedback on how we can improve things through these organizations.