Silicon Labs, Wi-SUN Alliance Member, Launches First Smart City-Focused Wi-SUN SoCs

Silicon Labs has confirmed its support of a new standard for smart city infrastructure communication, dubbed Wi-SUN (Wireless Smart Ubiquitous Network), which it claims is built to offer long-range yet high-throughput with full support for IPv6 — and to prove it the company is launching its own Wi-SUN system-on-chip (SoC).

"As the leader in IoT wireless connectivity, Wi-SUN is the perfect addition to our portfolio," says Matt Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of IoT Products at Silicon Labs. "Wi-SUN is a comprehensive solution optimized for large scale, long-range LPWAN networks. Our Wi-SUN technology enables a non-proprietary approach to industrial and smart city applications, making deployments more scalable, resilient and safer."

The Wi-SUN Field Area Network (FAN) technology itself is a combination of the company's EFR32 hardware platform with an IPv6 mesh networking stack, advanced deployment tools, sub-gigahertz wireless communication, and optimizations made with the Internet of Things in mind.

"Wi-SUN FAN has numerous technical benefits over other LPWAN [low-power wide-area network] solutions, including superior coverage and resilience through mesh networking, better interference mitigation through frequency hopping, and enterprise-grade security already proven at a very large scale," explains Wi-SUN Alliance president and chief executive Phil Beecher of the technology. "One can think of Wi-SUN FAN as a true Internet-like infrastructure optimized for IoT devices."

"The Wi-SUN Alliance's mission is to bring Smart Ubiquitous Networks to service providers, utilities, municipalities and other smart city enterprises. We are pleased to see Silicon Labs and other alliance member companies innovating new solutions on the Wi-SUN FAN specification, which defines everything needed to build secure, reliable, and resilient networks for large scale outdoor smart city applications."

As well as having a place on the board and being an existing member of the Alliance, Silicon Labs is showing its support for Wi-SUN with an SoC launch: the EFR32xG12 family, a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 offering with a choice of sub-1GHz and 2.4GHz connectivity, 512kB or 1MB of flash, 64kB, 128kB, or 256kB of RAM, up to 65 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, and integrated accelerators for AES-128, AES-256, ECC, SHA-1, and SHA-2 operations — ideal, the company claims, for smart city applications, smart metering, and other IoT use-cases.

More information on the Wi-SUN SoC range can be found on the Silicon Labs website; starter kits will be coming soon, the company has promised, but are not yet available to order.