Simplify the smart home with Dialog’s ultra-low-power Wi-Fi platform

The vision of a smart home is to help you make life easier, such as helping you cook food, buy ingredients, self-cleaning, open the curtains to gently wake you in the morning, etc., but the reality is still far from this.

Today’s smart home applications employ a variety of protocols that can be difficult for non-tech-savvy consumers to understand. You can go to the store and buy any phone or laptop, and they will definitely connect to a Wi-Fi network, but when shopping for a smart home device, you must first make sure it works with your existing equipment. The problem with the smart home is the fragmentation of IoT protocols. High-bandwidth applications use Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Low-power devices use Zigbee and Z-wave. There are also multiple versions of Zigbee, which are not compatible with each other. Z-wave is a proprietary protocol that locks users and device manufacturers into one vendor.

To build a smart home using these protocols, you need to have an expensive smart home control system to communicate between devices. And sometimes, even some well-known manufacturers of smart home control systems run into financial difficulties, preventing their users from continuing to use the products normally.

So, it is too complicated for smart home to achieve mainstream market adoption, because end users want low-cost, plug-and-play smart home devices.

Wi-Fi: the future of the smart home

How Wi-Fi will simplify the smart home

Historically, the main reason for protocol fragmentation has been the low-power requirements of battery-powered devices such as smoke alarms and window sensors. Zigbee and Z-wave have historically used lower power consumption than Wi-Fi and are therefore the protocols of choice for these applications. But that’s changing as ultra-low-power Wi-Fi chips hit the market. New Wi-Fi chips, such as Dialog’s DA16200, offer the low-power benefits of Zigbee and Z-wave while maintaining the simplicity, compatibility, and ubiquity of the Wi-Fi standard. With Dialog’s DA16200 Wi-Fi platform, embedded developers can now achieve a year or more of battery life in devices, including industry-leading always-connected IoT devices.

How does Dialog achieve ultra-low power Wi-Fi?

Based on Dialog’s patented VirtualZero™ technology, the DA16200 was designed from the ground up with low power consumption in mind. Having mastered the technical essence of low-power Wi-Fi, our engineers have developed Dynamic Power Management (DPM) algorithms that leverage various features of the standard Wi-Fi protocol to optimize sleep and wake times. The platform provides three sleep modes according to the application needs of IoT device manufacturers.

• Sleep mode 1 is the lowest power operating mode with a current of 0.2uA. In this mode, most of the functional blocks in the chip are turned off and the chip is disconnected from the network. The SoC can be turned on by an external interrupt through the chip’s wake-up pin or its digital and analog IO.

• In sleep mode 2, the device retains the RTC function, consumes only 1.8uA, and ensures that it takes less than 100ms to wake up in response to an external event or the completion of an internal timer.

• Sleep Mode 3 is a unique always-connected Wi-Fi mode that ensures less than 2ms wake-up time when an incoming Wi-Fi packet is detected, while consuming less than 50uA of average current. In this mode, the SoC periodically checks for standard Traffic Indication Map (TIM) or Delivery Traffic Indication Map (DTIM) information elements embedded in 802.11 management frames, and wakes up to start processing normal Wi-Fi traffic, if needed like any web station. The DPM algorithm has been tested on more than 200 popular Wi-Fi access points, ensuring that the DA??16200 can achieve low-power performance on any Wi-Fi network.

  

DA16200 DPM Technology Introduction

Dialog offers low-power Wi-Fi products and technologies, as well as easy-to-use development tools and modules, helping developers achieve faster time-to-market. Developers no longer need to deal with the detailed development of DPM algorithms and power management, simplifying product development. The widely used FreeRTOS and gcc-based Wi-Fi development kits help developers quickly prototype IoT designs using the DA16200. This kit combines a Wi-Fi module, USB interface, keys, and connectors to speed development and debugging of DA16200-based designs.

Summarize

Low-power Wi-Fi technology has the potential to replace Wi-Fi and Zigbee protocols in the smart home, which will simplify smart home networking by eliminating the need for expensive smart home control systems and addressing protocol fragmentation.

Dialog has revolutionized the smart home market with its low-power Wi-Fi technology. Dialog’s dynamic power management algorithms enable IoT devices to achieve a year or more of battery life, making Wi-Fi a viable alternative to Zigbee and Z-wave. With this Wi-Fi technology, end users do not need to buy expensive smart home control systems. Installing smoke alarms, smart door locks, smart lights, window and door sensors, smart curtains, and garage door openers, etc., is as easy as opening a newly purchased laptop and entering your Wi-Fi password.