Improving the Smart Home at the CSA Member Meeting

It was an eventful week in the Smart Home industry with the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s Fall Member Meeting happening in beautiful Budapest, Hungary and the release of Matter 1.4, all of which is our focus for this week’s Wireless Wednesday.

The NXP team had a very productive week at the CSA Member Meeting showcasing our connectivity and IoT technologies at our demo table, networking with over 300 attendees from 130 companies and participating in breakout sessions covering Matter, Aliro, Zigbee, Product Security and more. Industry collaboration is vital to bring significant and meaningful enhancements to the IoT industry and the team came away from these meetings with new perspectives, knowledge and insights—a result of engaging with others and contributing to CSA’s objectives.

Once again, we were proud to be a demo sponsor and share the latest developments in our CSA related efforts. This time, we showcased the following:

Matter Example Network

NXP’s new compact and expandable FRDM platform boards—including FRDM-RW612 and FRDM-IMX93 running industry-leading tri-radio technology and secure processing along with FRDM-MCXW71 running as a secure Thread device—created a Matter smart home network. This included Matter End Devices and a Matter Controller. The RW612 tri-radio MCU, and the i.MX 93 Applications Processor paired with the IW612 Tri-Radio SoC also implement Thread Border Router functionality with the new capability for Thread network credential sharing and management introduced by the recently announced Thread 1.4 and Matter 1.4 specifications. This powerful setup displayed a complete Smart Home ecosystem. Using Matter 1.4 enhancements, this demo also included Ambient Sensing using Wi-Fi Sensing based on Channel State Information (CSI) and Energy Reporting on an Aqara Smart Plug showing Real-Time Electrical Measurements and cumulative Imported and Exported Power.

Enhanced Multi-Admin

New in Matter 1.4 and expected to continue in improvement, Enhanced Multi-Admin enables smart home controllers to manage devices across different fabrics, standardizing interactions between different smart home ecosystems. This capability is critical to delivering seamless device integration across ecosystems. NXP contributed its security and connectivity experts in the implementation of this capability in collaboration with other companies in the ISP, home control & security and smart home platform markets on the Joint Fabric methodology and created a visual guide on how this method works.

This approach to enhancing the Multi-Admin feature allows ecosystems to seamlessly join and create a joint Matter fabric with all the same security and capabilities that Matter has enabled today, but with the simplicity of a single on-boarding step for each device. It also maintains that ability for each ecosystem’s controller to co-exist and interact with the devices in the joint fabric, a key requirement for traditional home control, security, ISP and related ecosystems in the industry today. It is expected to be complementary to other approaches utilized by cloud platform providers including the Fabric Sync methodology that allows them to synchronize data, scenes and control between their complex controllers. NXP has been actively involved in enabling all methodologies to improve this critical aspect of the Matter user experience.

Wi-Fi Commissioning

Wi-Fi Public Action is a frame-based mechanism for link layer discovery and direct communication between the commissioner and the device without a Wi-Fi association between them.

In addition, we have been deeply engaged in the Aliro development efforts and demonstrated a UWB enabled hands-free smart door lock with a beta implementation of Aliro (under development in the Connectivity Standards Alliance, not yet released). Aliro will provide a standardized way for users to unlock doors using their mobile device or wearable.

A big thank you to the NXP team for all the hard work in preparing the demos and providing their insights into the work done at the Member Meeting. And a shout out to Wim Nuyts and Doru Gucea for being recognized as outstanding contributors for their efforts in Aliro and Matter respectively.

The above information can also be found on NXP’s CSA Member Meeting webpage.

Continuing to follow a twice a year release cadence, Matter 1.4 has now been released and brings support for a few exciting areas. The demos above highlight some of the new capabilities of Matter 1.4 stay tuned for next week’s Wireless Wednesday to learn more.