One of the most significant developments in the world of wireless connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT) of late has been the advent of multi-protocol wireless system on chips (SoCs), and at CES 2017 they were in no short supply. To this end, Cypress Semiconductor was showing its single-chip CYW43907 Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth combo solution based on the ARM Cortex-R4 processor core and backed by 2 MB of RAM.

One can imagine the benefit of such architectures for connected applications as, for example, short-range streaming applications can leverage Bluetooth and then connect to the cloud/Internet on the back of dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz). With pre-integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking stacks and supported by the Wiced Studio 4 software development kit (SDK), the CYW43907’s front-end radio antenna enables precision synchronization during multimode switching on the order of 60 ms.

“No one alone will control the smart home, it will be a mix,” says Brian Bedrosian, Senior Director of Consumer IoT at Cypress Semiconductor. “This is why we’ve added so much memory to the 43907 and other multi-protocol wireless SoCs.”

Moving forward, Bedrosian hinted at other multi-core, multi-protocol wireless releases in 2017 that will target 802.15.4 networking, including the possible integration of Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and ZigBee technologies, as well as both high-power and low-power Wi-Fi.

Not to be overlooked, however, is an announcement from the show that Cypress will be partnering with Verizon to incorporate the latter company’s ThingSpace SDK into the WICED development environment in the Q2 timeframe, which will provide turnkey cloud connectivity within a single development environment. The ThingSpace IoT platform will enable device onboarding, management, analytics and visualization tools, and other services to WICED developers through a set of application programming interfaces (APIs), with the end-to-end solution secured through provisions that start at the device level and extend throughout the network layer and into the cloud.

As Bedrosian points out, the partnership between Cypress and Verizon is “another ecosystem for the IoT space” that will enable connected products to be developed and deployed quickly, and on the back of technologies such as multi-protocol wireless SoCs, this process continues to get easier and more flexible.

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