Interop, Security Called Key to Broader IoT Deployment
IoT's potential won’t be realized without universal interoperability, seamless operation, an easy development process and strong security, said Silicon Labs General Manager Matt Johnson, keynoting the second day of the company’s first “Works With” developer conference, held Wednesday and Thursday. “If we don’t get the trust and security right, this is not going to happen.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“We saw this need in the industry,” Johnson told us, detailing the company’s reasons for holding the virtual conference that drew 5,500 attendees. The chipmaker sees its role as pivotal to the advancement of the IoT.
Silicon Labs supports “tens of thousands” of customers across thousands of apps, it has shipped 4 billion products and supports over 100 wireless protocols: “We’re right in the middle of this,” Johnson said. “It would be hypocritical and counterintuitive to not encourage attendees from other companies, especially when you’re saying, ‘Let’s get everything to work with everything.'”
The IoT is “at the beginnings,” said Jamie Siminoff, CEO of Amazon's Ring. Though the IoT numbers billions of devices, Siminoff envisions hundreds of billions, but “we’re still looking in a very linear way how to integrate things.” Privacy is fundamental to the next stage because IoT's about “trust,” said Siminoff: “We’re putting products into people’s homes, their lives, their cars, their daily systems.”
Today, “we either connect to the home or a hub,” said Siminoff, describing a physical product with security credentials, Wi-Fi, or a cellular network. IoT products can’t roam and are “stuck in the home,” he said. Though cellular has roaming, it’s a metered cost requiring billing, it’s power hungry because of distance to towers, and chips are fairly expensive. Sidewalk takes the best of protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave -- and cellular -- and “smooshes them together,” giving connectivity to IoT devices in a “cellular-like way" running off "the cost basis of the home.”
Amazon’s first foray into Sidewalk is Ring Fetch, designed to connect to a pet’s collar. The device will allow pet owners to track their dog within a geofence and get alerts when the pet leaves the yard. Fetch is a reference design for Sidewalk, said Siminoff. “Roaming is important for a dog getting out of the house,” he said: “It’s about meshing connectivity.”
Siminoff said Amazon isn’t trying to compete with protocols. Silicon Labs' Johnson said if Sidewalk is successful, “people don’t have to think about connectivity: Connectivity is just going to happen.”
Siminoff likened Sidewalk to a utility: “We don’t talk about how we’re going to get electric to our product when it gets to a house,” said Siminoff, because it's a given an electrical outlet will be there." Ubiquitous IoT connectivity could remove that element from the product design process. His dream: “That someone is listening and saying, ‘Wow, that unlocked a new idea of something I can do that benefits society.'”