Matter is about to be launched. What surprises will it bring to the smart home market?

According to the news on the CSA Alliance's official website, "After many delays and process changes, the Matter protocol will be launched this fall in time for the 2022 holiday shopping season. Initially, there will be seven smart home devices that can adopt the Matter protocol and be labeled with the Matter logo."

Although the release of the Matter standard has been postponed several times, people's enthusiasm for it has not diminished at all. After all, it will bring about an epic revolution that will not only affect existing communication protocols, but will also change the pattern of the chip and terminal equipment manufacturing market, and will also intensify competition among platform service providers. How will the specific situation develop and how are the companies in the industry chain preparing? Please follow me to read on.

A simple introduction to Matter

As early as July 2014, Google, which excels at open ecosystems, noticed the possible fragmentation of smart homes. So after acquiring Nest, which was making some progress in the smart home industry at the time, it developed Thread, a transport layer/network layer protocol based on the IP protocol. At the same time, it joined forces with Apple to promote it. Since Thread did not define the application layer standard, the two companies established platforms based on their own ecosystems, Google's called OpenWeave and Apple's called HomeKit.

As Thread's market share gradually increases, it has become separated from other communication protocols such as Zigbee. Therefore, the Zigbee Alliance launched the Dotdot standard to improve the interoperability between Thread and Zigbee. The alias of Dotdot is ZCLIP (Zigbee Cluster Library over IP).

However, as communication protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Z-Wave become increasingly powerful, the inevitable split reappeared. So in December 2019, Google and Apple joined the Zigbee Alliance and jointly promoted a new IP-based protocol, the CHIP (Connected Home over IP) working group. The first wave of protocols discussed and supported were WiFi, Thread, Zigbee, and Bluetooth.

Later, in May 2021, the CHIP working group was renamed Matter, and the Zigbee Alliance was renamed CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) to vigorously promote Matter. The above is the origin of Matter. From the whole process, we can see that in order to solve the fragmentation of smart homes, various technology alliances are working hard, but what needs to be taken into account is not only technology, but also scenarios and markets.

After talking about the origin of Matter, let’s talk about how Matter achieves interconnection based on IP.

Matter Protocol Architecture (Source: Matter White Paper)

As shown in the figure above, Matter is above all communication protocols. The working method is that devices join the Matter network through Bluetooth, form a star network through Wi-Fi (or a Mesh network through Thread) to achieve interconnection, and can also connect to devices of other protocols (such as Zigbee and Z-Wave) through bridges. It can also be seen that Matter will support more network layer protocols in the future.

Integration of communication protocols to fill the gap in the application layer

In the smart home market, the diversity of communication protocols has led to the fragmentation of scenarios. For example, the lack of application layer protocols for Wi-Fi, Thread, Zigbee, and Bluetooth has long been a major obstacle on the road to interconnection. Matter, as an application layer protocol, will not only integrate various network layer protocols, but also have a positive impact on the development of various protocols.

Relationship between Matter and various communication protocols (Source: Matter official website)

Wi-Fi has become a standard feature of smart devices in the Internet era because it is connected to the Internet. And because it is a technology based on the IP protocol, it is natural for it to support Matter. However, in the field of the Internet of Things, especially in the interconnection of smart devices, Wi-Fi has not been unified at the application layer. Although Http, CoAp, and MQTT have been widely used, they are all standards at the communication level. Now that it has been incorporated into Matter in the field of the Internet of Things, it can better play its own advantages.

Compared with Zigbee and Z-Wave, Thread has the characteristics of decentralized mesh network, based on IPV6 protocol, more secure, more compatible, and supports more devices. Based on this, many foreign giants have joined the Thread Alliance. However, the technical advantages did not help Thread to be quickly commercialized. There are still some manufacturers' Thread products abroad, but very few in China. The reason is that there is a lack of unified standards at the application layer. Although there is application layer support such as Google Weave, it is still lacking in maturity.

The support of the Matter protocol will give Thread a chance to turn things around. Thread can use the advantages of being based on IP to easily access the Matter network and achieve interoperability between products. At the same time, Thread may begin to leverage the status of similar protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave in smart home systems. With the support of Google, Amazon, and Apple's ecosystems abroad, it may develop faster. But it will take some time in China, especially in terms of ecology. For example, the B-end fine-decoration housing market, where smart homes are most widely used, has almost adopted the Zigbee protocol as an industry standard.

Thread working principle diagram (Source: Thread Alliance)

As a system technology, Zigbee needs to achieve collective control through gateways. At this level, it is quite different from the protocols of single-product products such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, Zigbee hopes that products equipped with this technology can be plug-in and use, and provide services as single-product products. The Matter protocol makes it possible for Zigbee devices to be single-product, and comes with greater interoperability space. Zigbee devices can be connected to the Matter network through bridge devices, thereby achieving interconnection with products under other communication protocols.

Zigbee and other protocols are connected to the Matter network through bridge devices

It is worth mentioning that Matter will not suppress various communication protocols, nor can it replace them. According to professionals, its idea is to bring various protocols together under a shared umbrella and utilize the advantages of each communication protocol through standardization.

To make it a reality, the more important thing is the support at the hardware level. Although Matter does not have to rely on a specific spectrum or chipset, the chip can integrate several technologies and simplify the manufacturing of terminal equipment. However, once the upstream chip manufacturers change, the mid- and downstream landscape will also change accordingly. The benefits of this change are also worth analyzing.

Changing the smart home market landscape, companies in the industry chain are making further efforts

According to ABI Research's forecast, the Matter protocol will be approved and released in the fall of 2022, and Matter-compatible smart home devices and appliances will be available on a large scale for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2022.

This requires the support of upstream, midstream and downstream enterprises in the smart home industry chain. Currently, leading chip suppliers are providing new multi-protocol support by integrating the 802.15.4 protocol, and promoting the Matter transformation of the smart home market with a single chip supporting multiple wireless protocols. At the same time, terminal equipment manufacturers are also rethinking product design, manufacturing and life cycle management. On the one hand, they need to provide integrated connectivity, processing, security hardware and software, and on the other hand, they need to provide services and infrastructure to simplify the creation and management of equipment.

Some support Matter chip vendor SoC chips

Upstream chip manufacturers face challenges. In terms of Matter's functional requirements, protocol support, scalability, CPU overhead, and additional device functions, chip manufacturers are required to design chips that better meet its standards. In a broader sense, chip manufacturers need to rethink Matter's requirements for wireless SoC chips.

New wireless SoCs need to consider not only the cost of Matter itself, but also the value that Matter will bring to smart home devices. According to industry insiders, language recognition, video access and AI edge computing have all provided strong impetus for the implementation of Matter applications, and the chip product roadmap needs to keep pace with the times. When the product meets demand and has additional value, a large number of orders will follow.

The midstream platform service providers are mixed. When Matter is launched, major smart home platform service providers such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Xiaomi will promote the smart home platform market revolution by managing, controlling and deploying Matter devices. They will also benefit from the control of more smart home devices and become the "porters" of high-quality products. These platforms will focus on network functions, such as network distribution, security, privacy and functions.

However, for the platforms that have already taken over most of the market in the early stage, they have to face the result of equality and compete with other platforms on the same starting line. For example, Mijia, which has taken over most of the domestic market, and the new platform Lumi, although Lumi was "hatched" by Xiaomi and claimed to have different market positioning, now they are both platform service providers, competition is inevitable.

Terminal devices supported by Matter

Downstream terminal equipment manufacturers have both gains and losses. The first is the upgrade of existing products. For example, in theory, Thread and Zigbee are both based on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. Devices that support Zigbee can also support Thread, making it easier to support Matter. However, the Thread core is based on the IP protocol and has high requirements for SoC (requires >128KB RAM, >1MB Flash), which means that Zigbee SoCs with limited resources will not be able to transition to support Thread through firmware upgrades, causing traditional smart home customers to either use new chips directly for Matter development or start designing bridge devices to support Matte.

However, for new products, by supporting Matter, terminal device manufacturers will be able to reduce costs. According to industry insiders, in the past, manufacturers may need to develop separate SKUs (stock keeping units) for different products in different ecosystems. For example, smart switches sold to Amazon, Google, and Apple are three different SKUs, with the same functions but independent software and hardware. But after supporting Matter, each product only needs one SKU, which can reduce development and production costs and simplify the supply chain.

On the other hand, since Matter reduces the barriers to entry into the market, competition in the smart home device market will intensify. As new players enter the market, established manufacturers will need to make adjustments to product features, prices and profit models.

at last

According to the relevant information released on the official website, Matter is still relatively basic for devices and has not yet involved cloud connection. It is unlikely to expand to more complex interactions or controls between devices in the short term. This means that although all ends of the industry chain are actively deploying, terminal equipment manufacturers may continue to use their own cloud connections in the early stages due to security and other considerations. However, this is only the initial situation. With the improvement and standardization of the protocol, solving the scene fragmentation is what everyone expects.

At present, multiple sources have indicated that the Matter 1.0 standard will be officially released in the fall. It can also be seen from the news on the CSA official website that a foreign manufacturer called EVE has launched products that support the Matter protocol and is currently in a pilot phase in conjunction with HomeKit. With further standardization of the protocol, the official release of Matter is just around the corner.