Silicon Labs Demos High-Accuracy Distance Measurement and Smart Home SoCs

Feb. 27, 2023

At CES, the company showcased a forthcoming Bluetooth feature that allows two Bluetooth-enabled devices to accurately measure distance between them. Also on display was the cross-platform Gecko multi-protocol wireless SoC family.

David Maliniak

Related To: Microwaves & RF

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage.

Silicon Labs came to CES 2023 with a number of demonstrations in its suite. In this video, Jayanth Krishna, senior product manager for IoT wireless, shows off the company's implementation of a feature in a forthcoming revision of the Bluetooth specification: high-accuracy distance measurement.

Called Connection-Oriented Two-Way ranging, the new feature enables two Bluetooth-enabled devices to be designated as an initiator and a reflector, respectively. The feature can employ either phase measurements over multiple frequencies or round-trip time to make distance measurements to ±60 cm at 30 meters. For this demo, SiLabs used its EFR32BG24 Series 2 Bluetooth wireless SoC.

In another demo, Matter product manager Rob Alexander used a pair of customer designs, one being a smart-lock implementation by Schlage and the other a NanoLeaf Essentials A19 smart color LED light bulb, to show why Matter is so relevant in today's market.

A manufacturer like Schlage that wants to market smart locks to support various wireless protocols can greatly simplify the number of requisite SKUs by implementing Matter. The suite's four demos (see image above) showed both Wi-Fi (on the left) and Thread (on the right) transports with Matter operating above the IP layer as an application. The demo at top left uses the SiLabs WF200 Wi-Fi transceiver paired with an EFR32MG12 Series 1 module; at bottom left is the company's newest Wi-Fi chip, the Si917, also paired with an EFR32MG12. On the right are two EFR32BG24 SoCs running the Thread demos.

For more CES 2023 news, information, and videos, CLICK HERE.

David Maliniak | Executive Editor, Microwaves & RF

I am Executive Editor of Microwaves & RF, an all-digital publication that broadly covers all aspects of wireless communications. More particularly, we're keeping a close eye on technologies in the consumer-oriented 5G, 6G, IoT, M2M, and V2X markets, in which much of the wireless market's growth will occur in this decade and beyond. I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, 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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In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy, leaving to rejoin the EOEM B2B publishing world in January 2020. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.