As the VP and GM for wireless connectivity solutions at NXP, I spend a lot of time with OEMs, talking about the latest trends, the challenges they face and how a semiconductor partner can help them gain a competitive advantage. The conversations are always enlightening and often guide our own work as developers.
That’s one of the reasons why I think our NXP Connects event, which brings together a prestigious lineup of embedded systems experts to share knowledge and unveil technology, is so important. The event lets attendees participate in the kinds of candid, open-ended conversations we have with OEMs, so everyone in the broader community can help define the way forward.
The panel discussion I participated in at this year’s NXP Connects is a case in point. Titled, “The Benefits of Interoperability and Security and the Challenges of Delivering It”, the discussion addressed one of the hottest topics in connectivity today – the new Matter standard for smart home – and yielded insights into the consumer demand for automation, the ways that ecosystem providers are working to transform consumer experiences and the ingredients that OEMs need to deliver innovative smart home products.
Our discussion, led by Bill Curtis, an IoT analyst for Moor Insights and Strategy, included Kevin Po, a group product manager and specialist in smart home platforms for Google, Carlo Treves, the executive director of product management and strategy for Comcast, and me.
I want to thank Bill for guiding our conversation and express my appreciation to Kevin and Carlo for taking the time to participate, and for being so enthusiastic with their contributions. It was a great conversation.
One of the things that makes Matter stand out is how quickly it came together and how rapidly it’s expanding. In just three years, some of the biggest names in consumer technology – Apple, Comcast, Google, and Samsung among them – came together, defined a common goal and created a 900-page spec for smart home interoperability. And now, in less than a year since Matter 1.0 was announced, there are more than 1,200 certified Matter devices.
That’s a rate of adoption that’s almost unheard of in our industry, and it’s one of the first things we talked about in our panel discussion. When Bill Curtis posed the first question, about why things came together so quickly, Kevin Po, who was part of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) effort to define Matter, recalled that “everyone involved had a shared understanding of the problem. We all knew that user frustration around setting up your device and having to choose from so many kinds of systems.”
I agree with Kevin, and remember people from different parts of the ecosystem saying, “We’re ready to collaborate. We’re ready to make the investments needed.” Matter is a standard that reflects a real industry need – the need to remove silos and simplify the consumer experience. It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s grown so quickly and shows such promise for widespread adoption.
When the conversation turned to interoperability, and the idea that insisting on a single way of doing things can stifle creativity and hinder competition, Kevin challenged that idea by saying, “Interoperability lets us tackle more interesting use cases. Today we have sensors, we have AI automation, we have so many capabilities we can build on. All of this relies on a foundation where all the devices can just talk to each other and have a common language in the home.”
Bill added that we now have the tools for true autonomy and can create smarter and smarter homes. But the smart ome experts he’s spoken to have told him, “We’re never going to get there if our developers are still trying to figure out how to send bits over a wire.”
What Matter lets us do is abstract on top of connectivity, so we can focus on solving more interesting problems and create something more intelligent. As Carlo Treves put it, the interoperability that Matter delivers means “you don’t need to be vertically integrated to bring innovation. You just need to be the best at one component of the industry. It lets innovation happen at a different level.”
Now that Matter is ramping up, those of us who have been involved in defining the spec are turning our attention to day-to-day issues of enabling fast time-to-market and helping developers navigate the complexity of the specification.
Although Comcast, Google and NXP are working on a variety of Matter topics, simplifying development is an overall theme. I think Bill put it best when he said that, by emphasizing OEMs and what they need to succeed with Matter, “it’s all about what you don’t have to do. The cloud, the software, [network] stack, the board support package. It all works out of the box.”
Speaking from NXP’s perspective, I couldn’t agree more. The OEM is central to our current priorities for Matter, which include three focus areas:
The discussion spanned the recent trends around Matter, its potential for the future, and its ecosystem challenges. Watch the panel
Sharing Google’s perspective, Kevin said the user experience is a primary focus. “At the end of the day, Matter is an application layer. It’s a communication protocol. It doesn’t define the user experience. The UX is an area where companies can differentiate.” He followed up by saying, “Ultimately, users want choice. And there are so many different users out there, even in the same household. Some may want one app to control everything, some may want specialized functionality best showcased in a dedicated app.” Matter gives developers the flexibility they need to meet all those different user requirements.
Speaking from Comcast’s perspective, Carlo talked about the idea of taking the “rough edges” off Matter, especially when it comes to the multi-admin features that let a controller from one ecosystem (such as Apple) control a device from another ecosystem (such as Google). The goal is to put the customer at the center, making ease-of-use the priority, while also considering other important aspects of Smart Home operation, including security and privacy. Carlo emphasized that this is what the CSA is working on, too, with their ecosystem-to-ecosystem work.
As I mentioned above, these are just some of the points we covered in our discussion. We also talked about adoption and the three paths that OEMs are likely to use when making Matter a part of their roadmap. We took a quick look at the future of Matter and the fact that it’s likely to have an impact beyond the consumer space, with use cases in automotive, industrial, healthcare and other applications.
In particular, at the end of the discussion, when we opened the floor to questions, the conversation took some surprising turns, addressing such issues as why the initial focus of Matter was on battery-powered devices, why Matter includes mandatory over-the-air (OTA) updates, why Matter supports Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Thread network transports, the intricacies of security certificates, whether 5G will ever be a part of the standard, and how, because Matter is a device network, and not a cloud network, it’s less reliant on cloud availability and network uptime.
So I hope you’ll catch the virtual version of our discussion by viewing the YouTube video and learn more about how we're helping to accelerate Matter.
In his role as the Head of Marketing for our Wireless Connectivity Solutions group, Larry Olivas and his team are focused on driving Wi-Fi solutions that address Access, Auto and IoT/Industrial segments. He is an accomplished leader with deep experience in building connectivity businesses and platform based solutions with over 25 years of industry experience.
