Thread technology is said to fill a critical gap in the IoT ecosystem by providing the industry's first standards-based, low-power mesh networking solution based on Internet Protocol, said to enable reliable, secure and scalable Internet connectivity for battery-powered devices in the connected home.
"Thread is poised to become one of the leading mesh networking technologies for the connected home, with many device manufacturers aligning with Thread technology this year and planning to roll out Thread-enabled products in 2016," said Mareca Hatler, director of research at ON World Inc.
Silicon Labs claims to offer the industry's broadest portfolio of mesh networking SoCs and a common development platform for both ZigBee and Thread solutions. The combination of Silicon Labs' Thread stack, EM35xx wireless SoC platform, and hardware and software tools provides developers with a migration path from ZigBee to Thread via over-the-air upgrades.
"Silicon Labs offers more than a decade of experience in developing, certifying and shipping standards-based mesh networking solutions," said Skip Ashton, vice president of software engineering at Silicon Labs and vice president of technology for the Thread Group. "We have a deep understanding of not only mesh networking technology but also the certification process."
Silicon Labs says its Thread solution offers a simple, secure and scalable way to wirelessly interconnect hundreds of connected home devices and to bridge those devices to the Internet. Thread software provides a self-healing, IPv6-based mesh network capable of scaling to 250+ nodes with no single point of failure and uses banking-class, end-to-end security to join nodes to the network and AES-128 cryptography to secure all networking transactions.
