Silicon Labs Series 3 Platform Leads the Evolution of the Internet of Things

Leading provider of safe, intelligent wireless technology for a more connected world, Silicon Labs, gave the opening keynote address at embedded world, North America.

CEO Matt Johnson and CTO Daniel Cooley talked about how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the Internet of Things and outlined the company's ongoing success with its expanding Series 2 and soon-to-be Series 3 platforms.

IoT devices must significantly improve connectivity, computation, security, and AI/ML capabilities in order to achieve this goal. Today, Silicon Labs released additional details on the Series 3 platform that will enable that.

The challenges posed by the Internet of Things' continuous acceleration will be addressed by Series 3 devices: the need for more processing power at far-edge devices across all IoT applications in important domains such as connected health, smart homes, smart factories and Industry 4.0, retail and warehouses, smart cities, and civil infrastructure, and the need for more portable, secure, and compute-intensive applications. They achieve this by attending to the principal requirements of the expanding IoT:

• Connectivity: Numerous items spanning all main protocols and frequency bands will be part of the Series 3 portfolio, enabling connections to almost anything. The most adaptable IoT modem in the world, with real concurrency across three wireless networks and microsecond channel switching, is built into the first Series 3 device.

• Compute:The Arm Cortex-M application processors and specialized co-processors for the security and radio subsystems, along with specialized high performance machine learning subsystems for specific devices, will be found in the multicore Series 3 devices. Combining the most scalable memory architecture in its class with Cortex-M processors that span from a twin Cortex-M55 working at over 200 MHz to a Cortex-M33 operating at 133 MHz, Series 3 devices enable embedded real-time operating systems and complicated applications.

• Security:Silicon Labs Secure Vault High will be supported by all Series 3 devices, along with further capabilities like Authenticated Execute in Place that enable reliable connection between the device and the cloud. Along with hardening one of the main attack routes when hackers obtain physical access, Series 3 will also feature the most secure memory interface in the world, safeguarding the intellectual property of the device manufacturer. The post-Quantum encryption standards that were recently announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology will also be incorporated into Series 3. 

• Smart: The second-generation Matrix Vector Processor from Silicon Labs, which transfers demanding machine learning tasks from the main CPU to a dedicated accelerator built to boost ML performance by up to 100x in wireless, battery-powered devices while significantly lowering power draw, will be included in a select number of Series 3 devices.