Company news--Karmin Electronic (HK) Limited

The Matter standard brings new opportunities to smart homes, with memory becoming the key to victory
2023-05-17

As the Internet of Things gradually becomes a reality with the development of technology, smart homes have also entered countless households. From smart switches and curtains to air conditioning and sweeping robots controlled by mobile phones, to increasingly understanding smart speakers, household appliances are becoming increasingly "smart" and bringing people a more convenient life.

With the increasing variety of smart home products, people's requirements for cross platform connectivity and hardware performance are also constantly increasing. The different communication protocols between different brands and products have become the biggest pain point of interconnection, and the release of Matter 1.0 has solved the problem of cross platform and cross protocol connectivity. However, performance upgrades such as power consumption, speed, and security require smart home developers to choose chip products with higher performance, especially memory, which is one of the core components.

The emergence of the Matter standard opens up a new era of smart home

The CSA Connectivity Standards Alliance and its members officially released the Matter 1.0 standard in 2022, aiming to create a new open smart home protocol that breaks the barriers between different brands and devices. The Matter 1.0 protocol almost covers the common types of smart home devices in the current market, including televisions, switches, curtains, lighting, security, and so on. In addition, Matter 1.0 has also introduced a disruptive feature - diverse management, where a device can be controlled by multiple devices or apps.

As an application layer standard, the Matter 1.0 protocol enables multiple devices that support IP networks to work together. Its essence is to treat the network as a shared resource without setting network ownership and access rights, which is equivalent to creating a "universal language" that allows products from different manufacturers, brands, and protocols to "understand each other", thus achieving the interconnection of multiple protocol networks.

Brief diagram of the Matter architecture

From then on, smart home devices that support the Matter standard can be easily connected by users with simple operations such as tapping and scanning codes. Imagine a scene where a user unlocks the door with their fingerprint, the intelligent curtains of brand A automatically close, the sound system of brand B begins to play pleasant music, the fragrance machine of brand C emits bursts of fragrance, the water heater of brand D begins to prepare warm bath water, and the hot kettle of brand E prepares warm tea. Through the Matter standard, this user effortlessly enjoyed a smart life. In addition, the process becomes simpler when adding new devices to the Matter standard.

The advantages of the Matter standard are not limited to this. The CEO of the CSA Alliance once stated that the most significant step of the Matter standard is to incorporate security into smart home regulations, enhancing the security standards of the Internet of Things industry, such as security OTA updates, data security, compliance libraries, etc., in order to verify the reliability of the source and safety of each smart home device.

Memory is the key to improving the performance of smart home hardware

Nowadays, users' requirements for the user experience, functionality, appearance, and other aspects of their devices are becoming increasingly demanding, which has led to rapid upgrades in the hardware performance of the smart home market. As an indispensable and crucial component of smart home devices, memory chips have also begun to play a more important role in terminal products.

1. Equipment reliability to ensure user safety

Most smart home devices store users' personal information, including biometric information such as faces and fingerprints. Once these sensitive data are obtained by hackers, it will have a huge impact on every household. In the past, theft was often achieved by prying locks, but today, with the installation of smart door locks, thieves may only need Bluetooth jammers or hackers to invade the house. Therefore, the safety and reliability of smart home devices will be the focus of attention for consumers and manufacturers.

In addition to encrypting networks and communication protocols, hardware level security will also greatly benefit consumer security. As a key component for storing information, the importance of secure flash memory is becoming increasingly prominent. The principle is to provide a secure storage space and provide encrypted authentication, allowing only authorized hosts to perform read and write operations, thereby avoiding any illegal intrusion and malicious tampering.

Huabang Electronics' original W77Q secure flash memory provides multiple security functions, including secure startup and trust root, secure OTA updates, system recovery, secure data storage, and more. In addition, the packaging size and pin positions of the W77Q are completely consistent with standard flash memory, and can be controlled through the standard SPI NOR Flash instruction set, making it easy for hardware designers of smart homes to use.

2. Low latency real-time response capability

For smart homes, real-time response capability is a key aspect that affects user experience. Every consumer hopes to receive a quick response after calling a voice assistant. Therefore, this requirement places high demands on both memory read speed and storage capacity.

Currently, most smart home devices use DDR memory to improve device performance and response speed. For example, in intelligent speaker applications that require real-time transmission of audio data for fast caching and processing, DDR memory can provide faster caching and access speed, ensuring that audio data can be quickly loaded and played back. At the same time, DDR memory can also be used to improve the response speed and execution efficiency of voice assistants.

DDR3, which combines three major advantages of power consumption, cost, and performance, is one of the most widely used memory products in smart home devices. Huabang Electronics is a leading DDR3 supplier in the industry, and has previously announced that it will continue to supply DDR3 products for the next decade, striving to meet customers' long-term usage needs. Huabang's 1.35V DDR3 product can provide data transmission rates of up to 2133Mbps in both x8 and x16 interface configurations, bringing stable transmission performance to the smart home field.

However, with the further interconnection and intelligent development of smart home devices, from storing OS data to data buffering, which is used to temporarily store image, audio and other information for subsequent edge computing buffering such as face recognition or keyword recognition, the tasks undertaken by the memory carried by the device are becoming more and more complex. Traditional embedded memory cannot meet such high demands. At this point, it is necessary to plug in a faster reading speed HYPERRAM for temporary storage, in order to achieve essential key functions of smart home devices such as human-computer interaction, touch control, voice control, communication protocol switching, etc. For example, intelligent door locks can record facial image information and store it all in the external HYPERAM, and then store the extracted feature values in the embedded SRAM to accelerate the calculation process of the TinyML model.

At present, Huabang Electronics has updated the HYPERAM to the third generation product, with a capacity ranging from 32Mb to 512Mb, and offers various packaging methods including 24BGA, WLCSP, and KGD through the introduction of self-developed 25nm process technology. It is crucial that Huabang's HYPERAM 3.0 data transmission rate has been increased to 800mbps (at 1.8V working voltage), which can infinitely reduce the response delay of smart home devices.

3. Low power consumption and small size

For smart home devices, size and power consumption are also important factors that affect consumer choices. On the one hand, when the number of devices in the home increases, if the power consumption of the devices cannot be controlled, intelligent devices that need to run for a long time will become the "power consumers" in the home. On the other hand, modern smart home product design is increasingly focusing on visual effects and artistic style, so the size is gradually evolving from rugged to small and exquisite, which will bring greater challenges to the design of circuit boards, memory and other components of the product.

Since its establishment, Huabang Electronics has adopted low power consumption as its design concept and is committed to providing comprehensive niche memory solutions. From HYPERAM to LPDDR4/4x, and then to 1.2V NOR Flash, low power consumption has always been the "standard" of Huabang products.

In addition, Huabang is also advancing on the path of product size reduction, continuously reducing the number of pins and providing excellent performance in smaller sizes. Meanwhile, as early as 2008, Huabang has been providing customers with many high-quality KGD products, including DDR, LPDDR, NOR Flash, HYPERAM, etc., to meet their customized chip needs to the greatest extent possible.

epilogue

The birth of the Matter standard is not only the result of negotiations among several enterprises or organizations, but also marks a new stage of development in the overall smart home industry. It can be foreseen that when entering the stage of symbiotic and coexisting stock competition from the incremental competition of major brands, smart home enterprises will pay more attention to the creation of their own product quality. Multiple factors such as device interconnection speed, power consumption, and data security will be the focus of long-term attention in the future. Therefore, chips such as secure flash memory, low-power memory, and high-speed DDR memory will shine brightly in the new round of smart home development, Memory chip manufacturers will also welcome a new round of market opportunities and play a more important role in the smart home industry chain.

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