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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Connect. Today, we've got another exciting episode to talk about the future of connectivity and in particular, a new protocol called Matter. To help us do that, we've got an excellent guest here, Suyash Jain. He's our 15.4 software R&D manager and also a board member of the Connectivity Standard Alliance.

So my name is Adrian. Here's Nick. Let's go ahead and jump in and learn all about Matter. So, Suyash, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So let's jump right in. Brand new technology standard-- what is Matter?

Before I answer that question, I want to go over what the IoT landscape looks like today in the industry. So today, what we have is we have a lot of good technologies, like Wi-Fi, serving high-throughput requirements, Bluetooth Low Energy, solving phone connection problem, and also we have Zigbee, for example, solving problem of mesh topologies, right? So when you need multiple hubs to reach a device, Zigbee comes in.

But what happens when you are trying to get an IoT or true IoT experience is you are buying devices of all these technologies, bringing them in your home, and then trying to connect. But all you can do is talk to devices from one technology and only that technology, right? So you have these walled gardens that you are then trying to patch up.

What, typically, vendors do today is they write additional code on top to be able to talk between these two technologies, but that is not standardized. So as an end-consumer, what I have to do then is I have to know which ecosystem or which technology have I bought products for, and then only use those products in my home. Now that's a big problem, not just for consumers but for developers, as well. Because when they are developing products, then they have to develop products for one technology because they know that doesn't equally translate to other areas or they have to write code for one ecosystem, another ecosystem, and maintain it, which is both cost and time.

So what happens is industry recognized this problem, and what they are now trying to do is they're coming up with a new standard that now creates a bridge between these technologies which is standardized. So this standardized solution is what is Matter.

Hm, OK. So yeah, Matter will kind of unify this home environment. And I've seen this problem firsthand, actually. So I get calls, text messages from my dad all the time, hey should I buy the Zigbee gateway? Should I buy this light bulb?

And he actually asked me about Matter recently, so I'm very excited personally about the technology. Where all do you see it being used? What use cases do you see for Matter?

So you can think of matter being used initially in home automation sort of networks. But then there is no limit, right? So it can go from home automation to industry automation, commercial automation. And then basically, it's offering connectivity. So basically, you just can think wherever you need connectivity, Matter can apply.

That's fantastic. And it's really exciting to see TI trying to help solve this challenge, right? Regardless of what you've invested in in the past, ecosystem A, I can actually go off to a store, buy some connected light bulbs, whatever that might be, and feel confident that it'll interoperate simply because of Matter now. And what exactly is TI's involvement in helping to define this new protocol, new standard?

So that's a good question. So TI has been a long-time board member of Zigbee Alliance, which is now the Connectivity Standards Alliance. As a board member, TI, in this case, I was lucky to be there. We participated when the opportunity to discuss this proposal came up. We looked at the merits of the proposal, and TI agreed to participate and develop the standard and promote the standard, which is basically what we're doing right now.

And we are participating in the alliance as in various avenues. So there are 30+ groups that are there in the Connectivity Standard Alliance to develop these standards. We have contributed heavily in various groups, as well as we are developing and implementing the code and porting the code or adopting the code that is being developed by the industry participation onto TI platforms. Now, what that means is developers today can get TI platforms, and then they can start writing their own product-specific code on top, the standard compliance code.

So that's basically-- TI has been involved from the beginning and is now contributing and getting platforms ready so developers today can start developing their products. And when the standard becomes 1.0, can have products out in the market.

Awesome. Yeah, it's exciting. I always like when TI is kind of involved in a leadership position from the beginning, bringing these new technologies to market. And you mentioned several times developers getting started, code being available. Where can people get started today, and what can they expect from TI if they want to start playing with Matter?

Right. Excellent question. So what Connectivity Standards Alliance has done is they have developed the standard-- not just the standard specification, but they are also developing the code, as well, as open-source software. So what TI has done is TI has enabled device TI's development platforms onto that repository. So developers can today go on the Connectivity Standards Alliance Git repo and go to the TI platforms. And there they can see that we not only have the examples supported but very easy-to-use user guides. So they can follow the instructions, get the code building, and download the code onto the development platforms and start seeing what Matter does. And on top of that, extend that to implement their own specific extensions onto the products.

Awesome. So it sounds like there's code available today. They can get started. Suyash, thank you so much for being here. It's always great when we can pick the brain of somebody from our R&D team who's close to the technology and actually on the board of the Connectivity Standards Alliance.

Thank you guys for joining us, as well. Make sure to check out some of the resources linked below if you want to get started with Matter. If you want to learn more, we'll have everything you need down there.

As always, we have more planned, more great connectivity videos coming up. Don't miss those. Thank you.

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