IZ-Wave is powered by a new chip supplier – Stacey in IoT
If you need another sign that Matter isn’t going to kill all existing standards in the smart home anytime soon, check out this week’s launch of Trident IoT, a new company dedicated to building Z-wave chips. Trident was founded in April to design and support Z-wave devices, and launched this week with news that it has been releasing its chips for over a month and plans to sample them to customers before the end of the year.
This is big news for the smart home and the Z-Wave standard in particular. For decades, when I talked to people about the Z-Wave standard, I heard praise for the reliability of the mesh network and the frustration that only one company, Zensys, provided silicon. This worried customers because they wanted a second source of chips to keep prices in line, and act as an option in case Zensys went out of business.
In 2008, Zensys was bought by Sigma Designs, and is hoping for another silicon supplier or the opening of a standard rose, but Sigma Designs did not open the radio protocol. In 2018 when Silicon Labs decided to buy Sigma Designs, Z-Wave customers got excited again. And in 2020, Silicon Labs began the process of opening the standard by releasing the Z-Wave Alliance. Then in 2022, the Z-Wave Alliance announced that the source code was available to anyone, and that the technology was included in a new chip.
So it’s been a long road to Trident IoT and the second source of Z-Wave chips. And at that time the smart home gained more popularity and talking about radio standards was used in the discussion of interoperability between different vendors’ ecosystems. Instead of focusing on Z-Wave or ZigBee, customers were trying to figure out if the sensor worked with Nest or Alexa. Security companies still use Z-Wave in their systems, and serious DIYers can buy hubs that include Z-Wave radios, but after major tech vendors said they would go back to the Matter standard for the smart home that will use Wi-Fi and Thread, it seemed like Z-Wave would disappear.
And it is possible, but not without a fight. I’m still talking to companies that build security system hardware and access control devices deployed on Z-Wave, and the Z-Wave Alliance has put a lot of effort into creating a long-range version of a mesh network that can send data over a mile. As of March of this year, there were more than 4,000 Z-Wave certified devices, and Trident IoT Founder and CTO Mariusz Malkowski, says he has talked to potential customers about building more.
Malkowski also explained that Trident IoT will focus on other protocols to ensure that its customers can create devices that work with Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, ZigBee and whatever the client needs. The company has engineers specializing in many different IoT protocols. Trident’s adoption of all standards reminds me of Silicon Labs’ focus on being a dedicated IoT chip company.
Malkowski says Silicon Labs supports what the company is doing and there is a quote from a Silicon Labs employee in Trident’s press release. I expect that if Trident is successful it will encourage more companies to adopt Z-Wave or keep existing Z-Wave customers happy, now that there is a second source of chips. This benefits both companies.
And frankly, it’s beneficial for customers too, especially if the hubs actually come back. The story so far has growing pains, and the potential benefits of the long-range Z-Wave option for powering sensors in yards or remote access control devices are huge. It seems like an XKCD joke about there being another level at play in the smart home, but at least if you’re a company betting on Z-Wave, you have another option.
