The chip market focused on the smart-home segment has a bold newcomer who just arrived at the party. Redpine Signals is claiming to have a new IoT chip that is so cutting-edge that it will leapfrog all its competitors’ offerings. The company outlines the advantages of their new IoT chip to include some pretty impressive features. Most notable of these is simultaneous multi-protocol wireless connectivity that is highly secure and can provide whole-home coverage. The article that follows does an excellent job of digging into the “what, why and how” of these new IoT chips.
All major chip vendors – namely, Qualcomm, Cypress or Texas Instruments – pursuing the elusive IoT market today are discovering that the smart-home segment is a roadrunner and they are Wile E. Coyote.
The challenges of a fragmented smart home IoT frontier are manifold.
First, the smart-home segment covers a vast diversity of connected devices, ranging from door bells, door locks and smoke detectors to smart speakers and smart refrigerators. Second, they offer too many connectivity options (WiFi, Bluetooth, BLE, ZigBee, Z-Wave and Thread). Third, smart-home devices often provide little interoperability on application layers (i.e. Apple HomeKit and Samsung SmartThings). Fourth, the security gap in IoT chips is a deep quandary. Above all, power drain continues to hobble smart-home devices. When its batteries die, the device is neither connected nor smart.
Into this breach, Redpine Signals is leaping this week, with a new IoT chip called RS9116N-DBT. Integrated with dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5, and 802.15.4. with Thread stack, the new IoT chip features an ARM Cortex M4 MCU with advanced security. Redpine claimed that this chip will not just attain parity with its rivals but also will leapfrog ahead of them.
