Integrated Smart Home with Matter Over Thread, Wi-Fi, and BLE

March 14, 2023

Matter can tie together wireless devices that utilize different protocols. NXP's demo showed control of multiple systems.

William G. Wong

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage. This video is also part of the TechXchange: Why Matter Matters.

Matter is an overarching Internet of Things protocol designed to link diverse IoT protocols like Thread, Zigbee, and Wi-Fi from the Connectivity Standards Alliance. It does so through gateways that speak Matter and one or more of the other protocols.

NXP is one of many companies supporting Matter. Sujata Neidig, Marketing Director with NXP Semiconductors, showed me how the company connected many of its Matter-compatible devices together (see video above).

This includes the IW612 Tri-Radio transceiver (see figure). The chip combines Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4 support in a single package. It's the type of device that would be in border routers that link the different networks together.

The NXP IW612 Tri-Radio chip handles Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4.

The IW612 handles dual-band Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) as well as Bluetooth LE 5.2 and 802.15.4-based protocols. Bluetooth Profiles such as hands-free (HFP), advanced audio distribution profile (A2DP) for audio streaming, and dual wideband speech (WBS) are just a few that are supported. The Bluetooth Low Energy support manages the 2-Mb/s high-speed data rate and BLE Audio uses isochronous channels for an improved audio experience.

NXP's Larry Olivas talks about the IW612 in the following video:

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.