Imagine these devices have NXPโ€™s new IW612 SoC | Image: NXP

NXP has a new tri-radio SoC that itโ€™s announcing at CES 2022 thatโ€™s designed to serve as a silver bullet for comprehensive smart home connectivity in a single chip, offering out-of-the-box support for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE 5.2, and 802.15.4 (i.e., Thread) all at once.

The idea is that hardware manufacturers building new smart home devices โ€” and especially ones building routers, smart speakers, and hubs that are designed to serve as bridges between different radio standards like Wi-Fi and Thread โ€” can now just integrate a single chipset solution to their products.

Thatโ€™s especially critical with the upcoming launch of the new Matter standard later in 2022, which aims to provide a single standard to connect all the different smart home software solutions out there from Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and other companies.

But smart home devices arenโ€™t just fragmented by platform โ€” they also tend to use wildly different connectivity standards. Some lightbulbs have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, while others use Thread or Zigbee. Thatโ€™s where NXPโ€™s IW612 SoC comes in: itโ€™ll make it simple for upcoming Matter hub devices to interact with a wide range of smart home devices old and new, which (at least in theory) will help the new standard better integrate with customersโ€™ setups.

NXP is already sampling the IW612 chip to its customers, and while itโ€™s unlikely that most people buying a smart home product will ever really notice the NXP branding, the new chip could help be a key part of making Matterโ€™s interconnected dream a reality when it rolls out later this year.

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