Matter promises to deliver smart home interoperability By Vince Hagen, Business Development Manager, Nordic Semiconductor
Matter is delivering unprecedented interoperability, simplicity, reliability, and security to the smart home, providing confidence to product developers and consumers alike
People have talked about convenient, time saving home devices for over 100 years, but while our homes have become increasingly utilitarian—and almost universally connected—they still aren’t that smart. Today, 97 percent of U.S. homes have Internet access[1], and while connectivity has been transformational, the use of smart devices isn’t the reason. The ability to read and send emails, navigate the web, stream videos, perform home banking, and engage on social media, all outstrip smart device use in the list of our weekly connected activities and use[2]. And it’s not as if smart home devices are a new phenomenon. For years it’s been possible to use smart home technology to lock or unlock your door, turn on your lights or HVAC, or lower your blinds, but the uptake has been slow. There are cost, security, and privacy concerns behind the inertia, but a core issue is a lack of compatibility.
As anyone who has tried will know, setting up and maintaining a fully integrated smart home is hard work. Products built for one ecosystem, won’t work as planned with another. Multiply that by hundreds of brands and dozens of device types, and it is easy to see why consumers can’t be bothered to try and overcome standardization and interoperability concerns. After all, it’s not that big a deal to close your own curtains. The arrival of Matter has brought about a rethink.
The Matter difference
Matter is an open-source connectivity standard for the smart home developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). It works by building on top of existing and established smart home wireless connectivity technologies—Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth LE—as well as Ethernet, and is Internet Protocol-(IP) based. IP is a proven, widely adopted technology which is essentially a network layer communication standard for rapidly moving data across the Internet. The advantages of this are clear – every supported device has its own IP address, and interoperability with the protocol makes it very easy to connect each smart-home product to the Cloud. With this flexibility, smart-home applications can be very powerful and flexible. IP also provides developers with a common and well established foundation for communication.
In a typical smart home setup, lower power Matter devices would typically run across a Thread network, while devices with higher power and data bandwidth needs will use Wi-Fi. Matter supports the Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet protocols for device-to-device communication, while Bluetooth LE is used for commissioning new devices to a network.
Wi-Fi is one of Matter’s primary connectivity protocols because it is established in hundreds of millions of homes and Wi-Fi 6 (which includes power-saving technology that allows designers to trade-off some throughput for longer battery life), makes it even better suited to smart-home applications. Thread was selected because it is a secure wireless mesh network that seamlessly integrates with larger IP networks without the need of a gateway, while at the same time being tuned for reliability and low latency. Bluetooth LE is interoperable with smartphones which form the ideal interface for commissioning and configuring new smart-home products.
Matter itself provides a unifying application layer—in essence a ‘common language’—across these technologies, that manufacturers can develop to, supporting compatibility and interoperability of their products across disparate ecosystems. By providing interoperability across ecosystems from major suppliers such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung, Matter promises to kickstart smart home technology adoption by providing consumers with confidence that whatever piece of smart home kit they buy, it will work with any other Matter-certified device. While Matter may not have entered the general public’s consciousness quite yet, it soon will because not only is it backed by the aforementioned heavyweight smart home technology platforms, but there are also another 340 or so companies behind it too, including wireless connectivity specialists, chip vendors, and big name smart home brands. This should provide Matter with enough powerful backers to ensure consumers shopping for smart home solutions bearing the ‘Matter Certified’ seal of approval will have their minds put at rest over smart home reliability and performance concerns.
Everything is smart
Since its launch, ongoing revisions to the Matter specification have delivered improvements that have brought new layers of interoperability, simplicity, reliability, and security, while unlocking new use cases and features for the future. The latest version Matter 1.4 released in November 2024, includes support for new device types that extends Matter’s reach to practically any smart home device you could care to imagine, including lighting, home security, HVAC, televisions, window covers, refrigerators, dishwashers, smoke alarms, washing machines, robot vacuums, ovens, laundry dryers, cooktops, extractor hoods home routers, access points, and water heaters.
Updates have also introduced new features and core improvements that enhance the Matter end user experience. For example, Matter now includes support for ‘scenes’ and ‘command batching’. This enables users to create a desired state for devices, rooms, or their whole home, by combining settings in devices that can be triggered with one command. For example, a user can set a scene that defines a color and brightness for each of a number of lights, and they can deploy that state synchronously across multiple lights with one command.
The promise of simplicity
In addition to bringing interoperability to popular smart-home wireless technologies, Matter is supporting manufacturers to overcome other well-known smart home pain points, such as the setup of new devices. For instance, Amazon has worked with leading brands to launch its ‘zero-touch’ Frustration-Free Setup (FFS) on its Matter-certified devices. FFS makes it easy for customers to set up new devices by leveraging existing devices or apps to automatically fill in network credentials, register the devices, link Alexa skills, and link to device-specific apps. In a best-case scenario, FFS can setup a device without any customer interaction and allow them to simply take a device out of the box, plug it in, and wait for automatic connection to the smart home network.
Another feature of the Matter spec, ‘Enhanced Multi-Admin’, enables cross system control out-of-the-box. This feature lets users share smart home devices with others in their household, regardless of their preferred voice assistant or phone operating system. The status of the device is synchronized across all platforms, and each user can retain their own existing scenes and automation preferences, without any compatibility concerns.
Alongside addressing consumers’ reliability and controllability concerns, Matter also embodies best practices around security. For example, each Matter device includes a unique identity, ensuring only the user’s authentic and certified devices are permitted to join the network. Data is encrypted to protect confidentiality. Fine-grained access control policies ensure each device can only perform the operations it needs to perform.
Chipmakers optimize hardware and software
Despite its many advantages, designing a Matter-compatible product will add complexity to product design, and require an upgrade in chip capability from silicon providers. For example, a Matter-compatible device requires both Bluetooth LE and Thread connectivity (in case of a Matter over Thread device) or Wi-Fi (for a Matter over Wi-Fi device) as well as enough computing power and memory to run the Matter protocol. For over-the-air device firmware updates the solution will demand up to twice as much non-volatile memory compared with the application software alone, and there will come a time when smart home solutions will also need to leverage the capability of machine learning (ML). Chipmakers have not stood still and have been busy optimizing both hardware and software with the new standard in mind.
Next generation Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) integrate multiple processors, each of which can be optimized for a specific type of workload and can support edge processing that assisted by software can help run ML models. Such models can optimize smart-home product performance affected by external factors; for instance, making corrections to HVAC humidity settings because members of the household have all arrived home together, or making a gradual adjustment to window blind closure time as the sun begins to set earlier each day. Best-in-class multiprotocol radios are also now breaking new barriers on RX sensitivity and TX power, delivering longer range and better robustness, allowing consumers to extend their network of devices for stronger integration throughout the smart home, including outdoor areas.
State-of-the-art security has also become a prerequisite, with today’s latest SoCs exceeding the requirements of PSA Certified Level 3 (the highest in the PSA Certified IoT security standard) – including secure boot, secure firmware update, secure storage, and protection against physical attacks. That will make smart-home products among the most secure devices on the market.
With these hardware and software improvements, and as the standard itself is tweaked to further improve interoperability, simplicity, and reliability, device manufacturers can focus more on driving improvements in product quality and developing new features, and less on apps and architectures to support onboarding of devices to divergent networks and ecosystems. When this happens, the promise of the smart home will finally become a reality.
References
- Percentage of population using the internet in the United States from 2000 to 2024. Statista, September 2024.
- Most common daily uses of the internet are email and browsing, survey shows. Allconnect, November 2023
Author biography
Vince Hagen is a Business Development Manager at Nordic Semiconductor and is based in Oslo, Norway. He supports the Nordic sales team in creating innovative solutions together with leading partners and customers across different industries.
