STMicroelectronics Announces New Chips for Smart Home and Wearables

How does a smart thermostat know when to adjust the temperature? How does a fitness tracker sync with your phone? The answer to these little mysteries of the wearable, smart, and IoT world, is tiny microchips.

Semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics has announced its next generation of such chips, the STM32WBA6 series. A key new feature is support for Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter.

Once they start entering the supply chain, these devices will change the way we interact with smart devices.

What Is an STM32WBA6 MCU?

Microcontrollers (MCUs) like the STM32WBA6 – which follows the Silicon Labs MG26 – are designed to be incredibly energy efficient, allowing for longer batter life in some of the devices we use regularly. Think:

• Wearable Health Monitors
• Smart Locks
• Remote Weather Sensors
• Smart Home Hubs

These components could make fitness trackers smarter, providing more detailed health insights. They could make more reliable and secure keyless entry systems, and more accurate environmental data.

Thanks to the ability to control multiple smart devices at any one time, you might even find them at the heart of future smart home hubs.

What Does This Mean to the Matter Smart Home?

When these chips start appearing in smart home and IoT hardware, they should bring with them:

• More features, with less power: with 2MB RAM, 512KB RAM on chip, devices built on the STM32WBA6 chip should last longer from a single charge.

• Enhanced security: cryptographic accelerators and TrustZone isolation make the chips more resistant to hacking. As IoT and smart home devices are prime targets for hackers, this is an important addition – and Matter’s specification is heavily security-focused.

• Improved connectivity: these MCUs support Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter, and this interconnectivity handles simultaneous connections to multiple devices.

Meanwhile, for manufacturers, designing a new generation of smart home devices with a faster development stage is possible. This means more devices, quicker – all with Matter compatibility.

You Probably Won’t See an STM32WBA6 Microcontroller

These technical improvements over the previous generation of microchips will have an impact on how we use wearables, IoT, and smart home devices. Fitness trackers with more accurate health data, a smart home that is more attentive to environmental scenarios… these microchips, and others like them, will make things more convenient, connecting devices once thought completely incompatible.

Companies like STMicroelectronics and Silicon Labs are playing a huge part in the development of the smart home. As the Matter standard progresses through future iterations, and the IoT grows, these advancements will have a big impact.