Silicon Labs announced a new collaborative partnership with Arduino to better enable the ongoing development of Matter over Thread applications for Arduino's 33 million-strong developer community. Developed in collaboration with Silicon Labs, Arduino's first Matter software libraries are available in both Silicon Labs' xG24 Explorer Kit and the xG24-based SparkFun Thing Plus Matter – MGM240P development board.
Code samples, reference designs, documentation, and more are now available on the Arduino Core for Silicon Labs Devices GitHub page.
Arduino is an ecosystem that offers hardware products, software solutions and cloud services accessible to everyone. In line with the open source nature of the entire project, the Arduino programming language – used in the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) – has grown and evolved over the years thanks to contributions from its highly engaged community and user base, that routinely contribute to the platform's ability to meet the new needs of the embedded computing market. Its intuitive interface and extreme ease of use have made it a favorite for anyone, from students taking their first steps into coding to corporate developers. This new partnership marks a crucial step in this direction, lowering the barriers to entry to make developing a Matter device easier than ever.
In fact, Arduino's shared software resources are incredibly powerful, with a wide range of pre-compiled libraries to help developers get their new devices up and running quickly. In internal testing, Silicon Labs engineers were able to configure a new flashed board as a Matter device and ready to be commissioned into a new network in less than two minutes. This represents a huge step forward in making Matter development more accessible, simpler, and faster than ever before.
A complete platform for Matter development needs both hardware and software, and as Phase Two of the collaboration between Arduino and Silicon Labs, the two companies are jointly developing a new member of the Arduino Nano family of development boards for small form factor devices. The new member of the family will incorporate the Silicon Labs MGM240 Module.
Based on the MG24 SoC, the module provides wireless connectivity using Matter, Thread and Bluetooth protocols. With key features like ARM Cortex-M33, ten dBm output power, low current consumption, and the highest PSA Level 3 certification security, Arduino developers can create robust, fast, and power-efficient applications while while protecting end-user privacy. Large memory of up to 1536 kB Flash, 256 kB RAM and 32 GPIO provides the capacity and expandability needed by Matter.
