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The world’s moving to the edge. No, that’s not a flat earth prophecy. In the dash to make everything smart, device makers are continually striving to put more intelligence and connectivity at the edge, and that has accelerated massively as we move toward making the “tiny” edge—at sensor level—more intelligent by adding more and more machine learning (ML) and AI capability to process the data or images without having to move it to a CPU or to the cloud.
This isn’t new: We’ve been talking about the drive toward edge intelligence for several years—for all the issues around latency, security and privacy, as well as bandwidth constraints. But now the whole process is being accelerated as compute demands and data volumes rise almost exponentially.
Almost every conference EE Times reporters attend is dominated by this topic. For example, at the forthcoming MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit in Grenoble, France, talks include debate on trends for intelligent sensing for a smarter world, ranging from image sensing, intelligent hearables and wearables, smart manufacturing, and smart agriculture. And at The Things Conference in Amsterdam, speakers address topics like smart cities, smart healthcare, flood management, building automation, water management, edge processing of environmental data in the Antarctica, and sensors for supply chain efficiency.
Almost all these applications are increasing the demand for embedded, intelligent, connected devices—especially in the sensing elements.
To address this, Silicon Labs this week announced the impending arrival of its Series 3 platform for IoT. Its CEO, Matt Johnson, said at the opening of the company’s Works With developer’s conference, “The Series 3 is purpose-built for the embedded IoT. It’s the most scalable, wireless embedded platform ever.”
He added, “Our Series 3 platform is built for a more connected world that demands development flexibility and that more intelligence be pushed to the edge.”
The new platform will move to a 22-nm process technology mode and leverage non-volatile memory tech and off-the-shelf IP blocks.
In addition to the new platform, Silicon Labs announced the latest version of its developer suite, Simplicity Studio 6, in which the integrated development environment (IDE) is decoupled from the tool suite, allowing developers to utilize other selected IDEs and not be locked into a vendor-specific IDE.
The company also announced two new SoCs for Amazon Sidewalk, the SG23 and SG28, supporting, respectively, either sub-GHz FSK for long-range connectivity, or dual-band sub-GHz and Bluetooth LE for device provisioning and local connectivity.
Series 3: Increasing adoption of the IoT
There was very little detail on the new Series 3 platform itself (you could call this a pre-announcement). But Johnson said things like, “this is a watershed moment,” and “this would increase the adoption of IoT to the next level.” He also emphasized that the new platform wasn’t just an incremental step but a massive step–in terms of enabling 100× improvement in compute performance for AI/ML workloads, more security and greater power efficiency.
In his Q&A session with media, Johnson said that the AI/ML-workload-performance improvement is enabled by architectural design innovation, using proprietary compute engines developed with efficiency for the edge in mind.
The Series 3 devices, expected to be introduced next year, aim to address the challenges that continued acceleration of IoT poses: demands for more processing power at far-edge devices like IoT sensors, cameras, blood glucose monitors, and the demand for increasingly portable, secure, compute-intensive applications.
The new platform’s key proposition centers around four pillars: more secure, more intelligent, more power-efficient and more scalable.
On security, it builds on the company’s PSA Level 3 certified Secure Vault technology and other security features available on Silicon Labs’ Series 2 devices. In the announcement, the company stated that new security enhancements would make the Series 3 devices the most secure in the IoT marketplace. When questioned, Johnson simply indicated that more details will be announced as products are announced, but that it would support what customers would need for the next decade and include post-quantum security.
On the “more intelligence” theme, the Series 3 incorporates built-in AI/ML engines, architected to improve AI/ML-application performance by more than 100×; for non-AI/ML workloads, other enhancements to compute capabilities are designed to drive up to 20× more available general-purpose processing performance, allowing integration of system MCUs into Silicon Labs’ wireless SoCs.
The platform also taps into the built-in AI/ML engine to optimize on-device power usage with ML, as well as other proprietary improvements targeted toward critical power points. This is aimed at adding years to a device’s battery life, helping to increase portability for new IoT applications.
A key feature is the common code base that will be used for more than 30 products expected under the Series 3 platform.
Silicon Labs said this makes it the only multi-radio IoT platform with a common code base for multiple products across key wireless protocols, including Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, Wi-SUN, 15.4, multiprotocol and proprietary protocols. This will let developers use one common set of tools to build applications and program countless devices.
Lack of lock-ins
Silicon Labs said one of the most common pieces of developer feedback is that they don’t want to be locked into vendor-specific tools—and they do want to leverage open-source communities and third-party applications to enhance their development capabilities.
Because of this, with the introduction of its Simplicity Studio 6, the IDE is now decoupled from the productivity tools, enabling developers to utilize some of the most requested IDEs in the industry and not be locked into a vendor-specific IDE.
Simplicity Studio 6 will bring the latest development tools to the entire Silicon Labs portfolio of devices, including Series 1 and Series 2, giving developers a bridge to Series 3.
In a press release, Michael Norman, senior product manager of IoT development at Silicon Labs, said, “We recognize that development is not a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why we wanted to present developers with the most complete set of tools, support for an expansive universe of providers, and let them choose. We want to offer a great platform, tools, and support and get out of their way.”
To fulfil that goal, Silicon Labs also announced an extension for Microsoft Visual Studio Code, the most popular tool for software development in the world today. This extension will enable new or existing applications using Silicon Labs’ products to be developed from within Visual Studio Code. A beta release of the Silicon Labs extension is available for download in the Visual Studio Code marketplace that works with the latest version of Simplicity Studio 5.
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