Skysta Black Week-deals hos Convic. 75% på mobilabonnemang. Superrabatter på mobilbredband. Och pangpris på senaste mobilerna med 100 gigsurf. Vi ses på Convic.se. Är monogami verkligen naturligt? Kan man ens vara astronom om man är blind? Och hur är det egentligen? Stämmer det att män är sämre än kvinnor på att ta hand om barn? Välkomna till Mr. Beacon-podcast. This week we have Silicon Labs on the show. Their senior director from their...
Product marketing organisation, Dharaj Sagani joins me. Super knowledgeable person working for this billion dollar... of the Internet of Things. I'm biased, but I see the silicon chips as being pivotal to what we're doing in IoT. Silicon Labs has a really comprehensive portfolio of products. They're not tied to just Bluetooth. They have offerings that support all of the major IoT protocols. And so they've seen a lot. Their chips are in an incredibly large number of edge devices.
And they have, in the last year, been talking about Ambient IoT, helping to educate the ecosystem about it, and launching Ambient IoT products. that can be used to enable devices that subsist on energy that is harvested from the environment, very low cost. So I hope you find this a useful addition to your... encyclopedic knowledge of this industry that's changing the world. Check out this conversation with Dirage.
The Mr. Beacon Ambient IOT podcast is sponsored by Williot. Bringing intelligence to every single thing. Dheeraj, det är bra att ha dig som en som är rätt i den centrum av Silikon Labs på podcasten. Välkommen till Mr. Beacon podcast. Thanks Steve for having me at the podcast here. I'm looking forward to the conversation. I've heard a lot of good things about the podcast. I've heard a lot of podcasts that you've done. All of it is excellent work.
I'm looking forward to it. I appreciate it. And this podcast is a continuation of the Beacon Technologies book. It's an attempt to kind of make it an evergreen thing. Try and help people understand the building blocks for IoT, for what we now call ambient IoT. It wasn't a thing at the time I wrote the book.
And the chip vendors are really at the heart of it. Maybe I'm biased because I work for a chip vendor as well. But I feel like, you know, what we do are the essential building blocks, the Lego blocks that everything else gives. och utan att de här korengen... then it just doesn't work. And Silicon Labs, I think it's fair to say, is really focused on Internet of Things and kind of the local area network as opposed to kind of the cellular modems and all the stuff that the Qualcomm...
I'm looking forward to really understanding a bit more about what you're doing in Ambient IoT. I've seen a bunch of announcements from you, a lot of products. So I also want to... mer om Silikon Labs. Jag tror att folk måste förstå hur de giants är och Silikon Labs är väldigt viktigt. Så låt oss tala om det. Och senare, jag vill att picka våra brains om vad du ser i den industrie.
what's moving, where the growth is, where the opportunities are. So, you know, maybe we should just have a brief introduction of Silicon Labs and then we'll get into the Ambient IoT. For anyone that's not come across Silicon Labs, who are you? What do you do? Absolutely. Silicon Labs, we are focused on wireless solutions for IoT edge devices. We are not really going after really large devices, for example cell phones, laptops, none of that stuff.
It's really focused on the edge devices. In fact, if you really look at Silicon Labs, we have the widest portfolio of all wireless technologies which are used. In IOT devices. So name it and we have it. If you look at Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Matter, Sidewalk. Some of the new ones. Then we have Wisen. Which is another one which is there as well.
So we have a huge, in fact, the widest portfolio. And we always strive to stay on the leading edge of these wireless technologies. We are very active in all of these alliances to see what exactly is required by the end customers and how. We as Silicon Labs can help out these end customers to design IoT Edge devices with these wireless standards. Very good. And so like Bluetooth 6 has just come out. We just recorded an interview with...
about channel sounding. Only on the Mr. Beacon podcast would you have a whole episode on channel sounding and Bluetooth 6. Is that something that you're going to be supporting, are supporting now? Oh, absolutely. In fact, Bluetooth, we've always stayed on the leading edge of the Bluetooth technology all along, right? So we started working on Bluetooth several kind of...
Years back and decade plus back. We have always stayed on the leading edge of all the Bluetooth standards which have come out including in fact 5.x along with 6.0 which is now channel sounding. So 5.x, which had, of course, AOX, some of those as well. So if you look at the applications of Bluetooth, and you know that well, right, from your other IoT job as well, and of course you're looking into that, it has a huge number of applications, and they're just growing.
Day by day. So, of course, everything which was Bluetooth Classic is moving over to Bluetooth Low Energy. All the audio stuff is moving over there as well. Throughputs are increasing. Bluetooth now supports high throughputs. They are even thinking of going up to 8 megabits per second moving forward. And they are also looking at other bands, not just 2.4 gigs.
They're looking at 6 GHz band as well. All the things are changing. Of course, if you look at it, Bluetooth Classic is really primarily focusing now on audio applications and everything else seems to be moving on to Bluetooth energy. which eventually will take over all of you as well. So channel sounding, of course, right? So we just announced a channel sounding solution as well. And that's one of our...
Major products, right? Because channel sounding is extremely beneficial when you're trying to do, in fact, ranging. And channel sounding, if you look at it... Vi har en stor delar av teknologi som kan vara använda för distans, direkta, all of that stuff. AOX helps out in direkta. Channel toning helps out in accurate distans measurement.
And we have done, in fact, we are the only ones who have a kind of production solution in the market today with Channel Sounding. And in terms of accuracy, we can provide most of the cases, it would be sub 30 centimeter kind of accuracy. In fact, with almost about 30-40 meter kind of a distance. We can go higher than that as well. But certainly there may be some compromises on the accuracy. So there are a lot of applications. For example, like...
Keyless entry mechanism. Door lock kind of applications as well. Where you can start using some of these channel sounding solutions. So we are quite bullish on that. And of course from a power point of view. We have extremely low power consumption. And this is something which is.
Pillar for Silicon Labs, because power is the basis of all of these battery-operated devices, right? So you need to keep going lower and lower and lower and provide higher and higher functionality. That's just the nature of it. And this is where this may be perfect segue to ambient IoT now, right? So if you get into ambient IoT, that's exactly what it is, right? So you really have to make sure that your energy consumption of the system is low enough.
So that it can be powered by ambient energy sources. That's what this whole thing is about. But if you look at it, it's not as simple as that. You really have to analyze the whole system. Starting off with what is your... Energy source that you are going to use. Which harvester are you going to use? What storage mechanism are you going to use? What PMIC power management IC you are going to use?
Then eventually, what is the wireless connectivity? What is the processing that you're going to use? Really, optimization has to be done on each one of these stages. to be able to create a system which is ambient, energy-friendly system, if you will. Right, so that's where I think we have put in a lot of effort. We are not into energy harvesting solutions. We don't provide energy harvesting solutions of our own.
We are dependent on partners who do that and some of the partners that we have kind of publicly talked about. Dracula for example is one of them. Dracula creates these very low dim light cells as well and which can help out in generating energy. So this is basically a device that can take... The energy from light and feed that into the system that you are providing the components for. Absolutely. So that's one thing which is there. And then in addition to that, we have partnered EPs.
EP provides a power management IC. And then we have another partner, Energes. In fact, we can harvest energy from wireless sources as well. So, of course, that is the energy harvesting part of it. Then we talked a little bit about the PMG part of it as well. Then there are storage, right? There are caps and all which have to be used depending upon...
The solution, the system that you're trying to do, you need to make sure that you choose appropriate storage devices on the energy side. And you said caps. Caps meaning capacitors, right? Yes. That's where you're generally not... Charging up a battery, generally, and it doesn't mean to say you can't, but generally you're harvesting the energy from light, from kinetic.
In the case of Energis, maybe from radio waves, and then storing it in a capacitor. And you can charge the batteries. Again, it depends on what kind of energy source that you have. There are things that can be done, so Energis solution does have that capability as well.
The question is, do we want to get to that stage, right? So I'll get on to why exactly we don't want to get there, right? And there will be some applications where we may need to do that, right? But now if you look at the last component of it, that's where we are focusing as a company. So if you look at the wireless SOC. There's a huge amount of work which has to be done to make sure that it is energy friendly. And just SOC, what's that?
It's a system on chip, right? So really what we have is MCU, microcontroller, along with a wireless solution. Wireless could be a Bluetooth solution, it could be 802.154 solution, it could be Wi-Fi, what have you, right? Så, but huge amount of work has to be done to make sure that this device is energy friendly. And what that really means is, first of all, the boot up time has to be extremely, extremely small.
The sleep energy consumption has to be very, very small. Transition from sleep to active state has to be very, very fast. The radio has to consume very less energy. It has to be very efficient. You should be able to transfer the data in a very small amount of time and go back to the lowest energy state. So all of these, if you look at it, significant optimization has to be done.
at the system-on-chip level to make sure that we are able to use the energy sources which are coming in and we are not dependent upon some large battery or large energy sources. So this is where we have put in a huge amount of effort. And ambient IoT, we are just scratching the surface right now. It's just starting, right? So there's a lot of work to be done in that space. But with our low-power foundation that we have, and all our devices are low-power devices.
We are progressing towards making every device an energy-friendly, energy-harvesting-friendly device. Yes. So you've long been providing system-on-chip. with the radio and the processor that will work with smaller and smaller batteries, coin cell batteries, printed batteries. And so in a sense... That's a form of ambience, because the cost is very low, they're very small, you can go everywhere, but of course...
You have to change the batteries eventually. And that's where kind of the infrastructure cost goes up. It's not the capital cost, it's the maintenance cost. And that can be the killer. So I think... Even though I think you can say a printed battery device could be ambient, it's really getting rid of the battery I think makes a better ambient device. It allows you to tag more of the...
The everyday things that are around us. Just one more thing I would add over there. In terms of if I really look at it. In terms of battery as you indicated. Just around that side. Of course. Reducing cost is an important part of the battery, but it's also from an environment point of view. Because if you look at it, almost about 15 billion batteries are used annually. It's huge, right? And just imagine the amount of... Det är väldigt viktigt att göra det och se hur vi kan göra det.
Very good point. Sustainability. Batteries definitely have challenges when you're... Looking at recyclability and basically even the warnings you have to put on products. When you have a battery then you have to put warnings and that can not be desirable from a merchandising perspective. And it can be a problem with temperature tolerance. We see more applications in...
in Coldchain, where the temperatures are very low and the batteries will work, but the battery life and the performance goes way, way down. And so I think having Ambient IoT to work in food freezers and so forth. There's definitely some benefits there as well. So you've specialised in low power. What is it that distinguishes... kind of the pre-Ambia IoT low-power solution and the sort of products that you're making that are focused on Ambia IoT. Is it just more efficiency? So, again...
If you really look at it, pre-ambient IoT, you had the luxury of battery and in some cases even line-powered kind of devices as well, right? And there is a whole big market for that and we are not saying that's going away and that's our bread and butter and there's a huge number of devices which will continue doing that as well, right? But again, as I indicated, of course...
First is reducing the energy consumption of the system is good. But you have to look at every step. And that is what we are doing. Every step in the whole system on chip. Where exactly can you optimise the time? Where exactly can you optimise the energy consumption? How fast can you transmit the data? Do you really need all the security level that you're talking about? Because as soon as you add...
Additional security layers, does that really complicate your system? Do you need it in some of these devices? So you have to really have a little bit of a different mindset, a different thought process from a system design point of view. And you also have to keep the sources in mind. What are the sources that you're looking at? How much can they provide you? And if a source takes a huge amount of time to charge a capacitor and then boot up a system, that's not a viable solution.
So you have to look at all of those as well to figure out if it is a solution that makes sense. So we think for example our current solutions from asset tag point of view. So as you indicated cold chain monitoring point of view. Those are some real life examples where we can certainly use ambient IoT. There could be electronic shelf levels, for example, right? Where you can use the light energy and make sure the shelf level kind of...
Charges on its own as well. So there are a lot of these applications. Where we can slowly transition. From regular IoT. To so called ambient IoT. Depending upon different energy sources. So what are the products that you. considered to be in that category, what do you have to sell for people that are building ambient IoT solutions? If you look at it, we have really launched one product family today. Which is, we are calling that as XG22 product which has.
Bluetooth capability. It has A2215 in there as well. And there are customers who can do some proprietary wireless 2.4GHz wireless. Not wifi. Proprietary 2.4GHz wireless. So this is something that they can do. This is something that we have officially launched today. And we are looking at all other products. And as I indicated we have.
Large number of products on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Matter, Sidewalk. We are looking at all of these products to see how we can continue optimizing the energy and making them more and more energy friendly. And more and more energy harvesting. Right, so that's something that we're looking at right now. So as I indicated, right, so power has always been the pillar for all the products that Silicon Labs does.
So, in fact, if you look at the MCUs that we have, in fact, if you look at the wireless technologies that we have, everything, power is our fundamental pillar. And then, of course... There are other pillars like security that I just talked about. Security is an important pillar. But in some cases, you may need to change the security level to make it more energy friendly.
We understand how exactly the energy consumption changes with different security levels. Can you be a bit more specific? Because I totally agree with you. If you're going to have... tag in an item of clothing that costs just some socks or whatever, then you're not going to want a full... And you're probably just not, it's just not going to be practical to have a lot of the key exchange and so forth. So how do you look at that?
Give me a few more specifics about what you've just described. Again, security is a huge level. So there are different levels of security. And some of our devices, we have PSA Level 3 security as well, which is built into the devices, which is... Driven by ARM, right? So PSA? Yeah, PSA, exactly. What is that?
So it could be things like tamper-proofing a device, right? So there are a lot of these little things which they keep on adding to it. And they're important. Again, when you're talking about an enterprise device, when you're talking about a medical device, when you're talking about a home security kind of a device. There are things which are important. But when you are talking about a tag which is going to do maybe a...
Temperature measurement or tag, which is going to be for simple locationing purposes, right? These additional things are not required. Do you really need to make a trample proof? Do you really need to do all the key exchanges which are required? Okay, and what kind of security algorithm?
Så all of those things, I think you can really think about what is the bare minimum that you need to do. And maybe you can say, I don't want anything on the MSU side. I'm okay with just the wireless security part of it. That's fine. So, those are the trade-offs which have to be made. And it's no, I would say, there is no single right answer to this. It's really dependent upon what your application is. And that's really based on that customers have to decide what makes sense.
So what we have done is in our energy harvesting friendly device that we have done, we have kind of reduced the security level for the applications that we are going after right now. And we have other devices which are extremely high security and they can run off batteries. They may not be able to run off.
And the entlite, for example. No, but then there are other components to this as well. So then we have the third pillar that we have now is machine learning. So machine learning is an important part as well. Now the question is... Can you do something with the accelerator? We have a built-in hardware accelerator, which can expedite, in fact, which can really process things very fast in some of the cases.
Can we leverage some of these accelerators to again further reduce the energy consumption of the system? Right, so that's another thought process that we are kind of going through right now and see how we can start leveraging these accelerators as well. Then of course, on the software side, what are the things that you can do to optimize the software itself so that the stack size is minimized?
It's bare minimum stack which is required for a particular application. So these are kind of different layers and you really have to look across every layer. And then finally you have to think about the protocol. Which protocol is suited for a particular application? Do you want to use group with low energy? Do you want to use Zigbee? You want to use Z-Wave? You want to use Wi-Fi? Right? Wi-Fi, a lot of people say, okay, Wi-Fi consumes a huge amount of energy.
In a lot of cases, I would say it may become energy friendly because it can transmit the same amount of data in a much shorter duration. And other devices may take longer. It all again depends on how much data you're trying to transmit. And let's say you're transmitting an image. Wi-Fi may be a much better solution as opposed to BLE also in some of the cases or ZigBee Z-Wave, right? Because it can transmit, go back to sleep. That way you can reduce the energy consumption of the whole system.
I totally agree with that point. I was just our CTO, Alon Yatskeli, who is really the brains behind what we've done in this space, was pointing out exactly that point. to me the other day when he was talking about where do we take the standards in the future? Bluetooth is a great transport for ambient IoT, but how could it be made even better? And what does Wi-Fi have to offer?
Because of course there's work building the ambient power functionality into future Wi-Fi devices 802.11 bp. So that speed, that ability to, even when you're sending. Just an asset identifier and maybe a temperature measurement, very short. But if I can do that in half the time, then I'm actually consuming less energy. We kind of think that speed necessarily means I'm consuming huge amounts. Absolut.
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Företagare, spetsa öronen. Just nu har vi på Hallon Black Week-priser på företagsabonnemang. Avrunda räkenskaperna på bästa sätt med ett enkelt och billigt företagsabonnemang från bara 9 kronor i månaden i fyra månader när ni skaffar Hallon. Vi ses på Hallon Företag. We haven't squeezed all the juice out of the lemon. There's more that we can do to make the edge devices more ambient friendly and the end nodes more ambient friendly as well.
Yeah. So now if you look at Wi-Fi, going back to the Wi-Fi point, right? With the new standard of Wi-Fi, that is Wi-Fi 6, a lot of improvements have happened. So really you can have a lot more devices coexisting in the same environment with less collisions.
That way you can really transmit freely. Earlier, that was not the case. With Wi-Fi 4, a very less number of devices could coexist and there was a lot more collision which was happening which was increasing the energy consumption of the system.
Because with collisions you have to retry. With Wi-Fi 6, there's a significant change that has happened. Lot more devices can coexist. So it has become a little bit more ambient friendly. And now there's a whole different angle to this as well, right? So frequency, which frequency domain should you be operating?
Sub-gigahertz, for example. Sub-gigahertz can provide you a longer range. Much longer range. Right? So the question is, in some of the applications, that may make sense to use a sub-gigahertz kind of a solution. It could be a proprietary, it could be a standard-based solution, whatever, what have you. But it may make sense to do that along with necessary energy harvesting solutions as well. So you have to look into that component as well, protocol.
Then you're going into the kind of frequency that you're using. So all of those are important components. Yeah. Are you able to talk a bit more about your relationship with Energis? Because that's a company that we've had on the podcast. Partnered with them. My own company has partnered with them. Can you talk a bit more about your relationship with them?
Sure, absolutely. So we are always in fact partnering with companies like Energes who can provide us the necessary energy harvesting kind of solutions. And Energes is a pretty interesting one because they do have wireless. kind of charging capabilities and that is really what makes them interesting and there are radio waves all around if there's something that we can do to use that.
...to charge, and that is where Energes comes in, right? So we have demonstrated solutions with them on our XG22 device. We have demonstrated a solution where we had an Energes solution sitting on the side and that was providing energy to our... HG22 för tag kind of an application. So we have done that and we have done some similar applications with Dracula for example. Dracula along with EPs we have done that as well. So the thing is we are not dictating the energy sources.
Energy sources are coming based on the application. We have to look at the ambient energy sources available for a particular application. So we are open to... All partners who can help us out. It could be kinetic. It could be light. It could be radio waves. What have you right. So we really have to look at all of those energy sources. Because depending upon the application. We have to pick.
In fact, in our case, the customer has to pick the right energy harvesting solution which can really provide them the necessary energy for the system. And who typically are your customers? So customers, in fact, if you look at Silicon Labs, right? So Silicon Labs, we have two major business units. One is industrial and commercial business unit and one is home and life business unit.
So industrial and commercial business unit. So just as the name kind of indicates there. So industrial is we are dealing with a lot of asset tag kind of applications. Right. So location kind of solutions. They could be. Sensor kind of solutions there as well. Then we have commercial.
We have things like ESL, electronic shelf labels over there as well. Point of sale terminals could be there. Agriculture is part of this as well. So we have a lot of agricultural sensors which are perfect for ambient IoT, if you will, right? So then we have home and life, where home is like, of course, when you're talking about home, there's whole home automation. There are a lot of things that can be done from an ambient IoT point of view there as well, because there are home sensors.
Temperature sensors could be ambient IoT-based. At present they are not, but there is a transition that you are seeing which is going to happen there as well. And there is a life, right, where things like, for example, continuous glucose monitoring systems. Then we have customers who are kind of designing the smartwatches who are using our solutions as well. So there's a whole broad range because...
We have a wide portfolio of wireless technologies. And if you look at it, these wireless technologies are used across all of these different applications. But not all of them are battery operated. A lot of them are. And a lot of them may not be energy harvesting friendly either. But wherever we can find a space to get into energy harvesting, we are looking into the solutions.
Yeah, I think it's really exciting seeing new classes of products that are going online and I tend to talk about the food, the medicine, the clothing, but also the parts of products. So if we look at houses. There's all sorts of opportunities to connect more and more of the components of the house. And I think of like just. Double glazing, for example. Double glazing, it has a finite life. The life is quite long. So having a battery-powered sensor in your double glazing.
Probably doesn't make sense, but there's all sorts of potential sources of energy that... You could have if you embedded connectivity and double glazing. And, you know, this is really useful. We have the phenomenon of, you know, water leaking into the double glazing. Your glazing gets misted up. And then, you know, what happens when you want a repair or you want replacement? If you bought your double glazing 10 years ago...
You may not even remember where you got it from, the documentation, the manual, the reorder, the warranty, all of that may be missing. But if you've got... and a digital product passport that's associated with the double glazing then that can be really helpful for you as a consumer and if I make the double glazing
This ability to get the replacement business is just like one example of where I think Ambient IoT will spread from some of the applications that we're seeing today to things in the future. Absolut. Temperature sensors. At the home you have sensors scattered all over. You can have security sensors. That may be another one that you can start looking into as well.
There's a whole wireless sensing which is coming up as well. So there are those applications. And of course there are other applications. We are pretty big in metering for example. Electric meters, water meters, garage door openers. So those are some other applications that we are big into. Some of those applications may not be as much, but certainly I would say some of these other applications we can certainly transition into ambient IoT kind of solutions.
Very good. You mentioned Sidewalk earlier on in our conversation. I'm interested in coming back to that. Can you explain what Sidewalk is? I've been wanting to get someone from Amazon. the show to talk about it and one day it's going to happen but it seems like a very long road so if you can just explain what Sidewalk is and what you're doing there
In fact, of course, Amazon Sidewalk, it's a great technology for connecting neighborhood in reality, right? That's what we're talking about here. And we are a very close partner of Amazon. We have developed multiple solutions with them.
Just as the name indicates, it's a pretty nice name. I like it because it's a sidewalk. What we are doing is really connecting neighborhood houses together. So you can, for example, share a small amount of your bandwidth. So it's typically, I think it's about 500 megabytes per month.
It's what you share. And then you can, for example, if your pet or your kids are playing in the neighborhood, through your neighborhood network, you should be able to figure out exactly where they are. So it's really kind of creating a neighborhood network.
Based on existing solutions right now, for example, everyone has Alexa at home. Alexa is already Amazon Sidewalk enabled. Right, so now the question is what you can do is you can create devices which can connect to Alexa, which eventually connects to the cloud of course.
And if somebody is kind of walking in the neighborhood, right, your kid or a pet, using your neighborhood network, you should be able to figure out where exactly the kid is. Right, so that's a pretty interesting application. So that's what they're trying to do.
It's in early stages right now of deployment, I would say. And there are some challenges in some other geographies as well. The technology is very promising. It's leveraging from a wireless protocol point of view. It's leveraging what is already existing, right? And that's something that they're doing. And the good thing about America, at least North America, the proliferation of Alexa is just huge in the market. And using that, you can really start creating this network as well.
Yeah, so I think there's an argument that says that sidewalk has a role in ambience. If ambience is connecting every single thing, then the range is really great. There's a strategy for getting you from the local area to the wide area because all of your... Ring cameras and doorbells and the Amazon Echo devices, they're all connected. So I think it is really promising. And the coverage maps that I've seen...
Pretty impressive. If this was a wireless carrier, they would be proud to have some of the coverage they have, especially in the metropolitan areas. Exactly. And the good thing is you're not... Det är ingenting nya. Overall, in general, it's pretty good coverage. And then sensors, for example, you can even put sensors in your, for example, yards and all. And those sensors can be connected to sidewalk and you can figure out what's happening. So in reality, for example.
humidity sensors which are on the yard. They can be on the sidewalk network as well. So, extremely good use cases. We are very closely engaged with the Amazon team. ...to see how exactly they push it out. We do have a large number of solutions which do support Amazon Cyborg today as well. If I wanted to start up a company, I get religion, I want to do sidewalks, so I buy my system on chips from you, but I need to do a deal with Amazon, presumably.
build that dog tracker or whatever the thing is that I'm building. So again, at the end of the day, The thing is, Amazon is trying to enable a lot of device makers. So you may not have to directly deal with Amazon so long as you're following the specific protocols. I think, so that's something which is there. So that's the reason companies like us, right? So we have all of those necessary components to make. Device which... Is Amazon Sidewalk enabled? Very good.
Well, we've covered a lot. I'm just trying to think if there's anything else that you want to cover. Hopefully people have got a sense of Silicon Lab's diversity of portfolio and market presence. Anything that you want to add in this section of the show? Yes, in fact, if I really look at it, of course, IoT has come a long way, right? So I started, of course, I'm sure you also.
I started looking at IoT when it was called what? M2M, M2M to IoT, M2M to IoT. There's a lot of progress that keeps happening here, right? One thing which we are seeing certainly is machine learning. I did briefly allude to that earlier. So machine learning is an important component of IoT. And with accelerators, this is one area that as a company we are focusing on because we think that's important for all edge devices. A lot more processing is going to happen on the edge.
So we started off with of course low power, all the wireless connectivity, we have security, we have the software. Now the next major pillar is machine learning and machine learning... First is we start with standard IoT, then we optimize it further to get into ambient IoT. But that's an important thing which I think is going to drive the industry forward from an IoT point of view as well as ambient IoT point of view as well.
So, that's an important one which I think, I'm not sure whether you've done anything on machine learning but that's one area that certainly as a company we are focusing on. And machine learning on the edge is a different problem, of course, right? It's a very different problem. So, for example, if you want to do data analysis, if you want to do, for example, some audio or voice analysis, some image analysis, some video analysis, everything needs different kind of capabilities.
On an edge side, certainly the limited resources are there and you may not have an option to of course connect to the cloud. So there are interesting techniques which have to be used to make that happen. So that's an area where we think it's going to grow as well. I couldn't agree with you more. I absolutely agree. We actually had the head of tinyml.org on the show. So if you want to go and anyone wants to check that out, that's really...
An organisation that's promoting, moving more and more of the algorithms that in the past may have run centrally on the cloud onto the edge where there's... A lot lower environmental impact and all sorts of other benefits. So we go into that. But I think, you know, one other thing I just want to add to support what you've said is that I think it's important that we think about Ambient IoT as like the...
extended nervous system for artificial intelligence. You know, it's all very well having this incredibly intelligent brain. But if it's kept in ajar somewhere and it's not really connected with the real world, then it's hard to really unlock the benefit of both the ambient IoT network and the intelligence, the incredible levels of it. But if we bring them together and we think about ambient IoT as feeding the sensing signals, the events into that central...
And then we think about distributing and, you know, taking executive decisions and then monitoring what's happening. I think it's a pretty good metaphor, the extended nervous system for AI. And just like the extended nervous system. All of your intelligence is not in your brain. It's actually kind of pushed down through the spinal column and so forth. And so I think... You bring up a very good point because that's exactly the...
We just have, I don't know whether you're familiar, we have Silicon Labs, we have our own conference called Workswit. And we just had our Workswit summit in Austin, then we had another summit in San Jose, then we have an upcoming summit in October in Hyderabad, and then one in Shanghai. And there, in fact, we had a keynote with NVIDIA. And that's exactly what we talked about. So from Silicon Labs point of view, what we are doing is we are creating...
We are providing wireless solutions for creating these IoT edge devices. These IoT edge devices, a lot of those are ambient IoT edge devices, will feed into... Det är en system som kan göra mycket mer AI-processer. Och det är att få alla data som är behövda att göra det här. Right, so it's an interesting combination. So we are feeding into that system as you just indicated. So we have all of these sensors or edge devices feeding into a central system which can do a lot more processing.
figure out what to do with that whole data, right? So we are enabling that. So this is pretty interesting if you get a chance. In fact, take a look at that. It's a combination of Keynote from Silicon Labs and NVIDIA combined as well. I will check that out. That's fascinating. And what's interesting about it is you have NVIDIA, quintessential chip company, working with Silicon Labs.
chip technology, and you see complementary aspects of where those companies fit in at a system level. And, you know, I would have invited you. My day job is at Williot. We interview people that have competitive products all the time because I think it's all about growing the size of the pizza, not arguing which slice is which. But I would say what Williot does is... to what Silicon Labs does kind of where the kind of the very.
of the fingertips of that central nervous system and you have the hands and the arms and NVIDIA has the brain and silicon is really the foundation for that. That complete ecosystem. And we also have an embedded world. In Austin coming up next week. It's the first time it's happening in US. So we have some nice.
The CEO, Matt, as well as the CTO, Daniel, they're giving a keynote as well there. So if you get a chance, just take a look at that as well. So we're going to talk about some of these as well. Very good. Hopefully people will be able to see that online and catch what happened. I think this episode will probably go out just after that, but no doubt these sessions will be accessible for people.
So, Deraj, were you able to choose three songs that have meaning for you? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. In fact, just from a music point of view, I listen to more Hindi music. That English music. But certainly I would say 80% plus time is Hindi. But I do listen to a lot of English songs as well. Okay, well you can choose Hindi music. We're not, we've definitely had people that have. But it's whatever you decided is fine.
No, no, I've chosen English music which people can relate to that as well. So I do listen to a lot of songs there but not as much as the Hindi side of things, right? So a few things which I picked, in fact I was just thinking about it, what from a...
Yeah, family point of view and really from my past point of view as well, what makes sense. So the first thing which came to mind was really when I talk to my kids and when they are running into some problems, they always say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Right, so this is something, even though the song, if you really look at it, is more related to breakup and all, but in reality it can be translated to anything in life, right? So anything that if you are going through a tough time... It's fine. It's going to pass and it's going to make you stronger. It's going to make you a fighter. So this is a song by Kelly Clarkson, right? Who is a Texan born, right? And I'm also in Austin. So it kind of works well there as well. Very good.
Very good. Nice choice. So this is an interesting one. The second one which I kind of relate to because I grew up in India, moved over to US sometime back, but... Is the song Of course the guy is from UK Phil Collins Another day in paradise Ah It's a very popular one, of course. And the lyrics are just beautiful over there. And it's an emotional song, right? But it's something that I can relate to. Growing up, I had seen a lot of these cases. So I could relate to that song.
Yeah, so you're in Texas now. You've spent time in the Bay Area, it looks like. Oh yeah, absolutely. I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. I spent almost about 20 years in the Bay Area. Then we got acquired by Silicon Labs. So I moved over to Austin after we got acquired. And so what we, I mean, I, my transition from having grown up in England and then growing up or being an adult professional part of my life.
Här, you know, those experiences are very important to me, or just sort of significant. What was it like for you? How old were you when you relocated from India to America? I was 21. In fact, after my bachelor's, immediately after my bachelor's, I came over to the Bay Area. Spent almost about 20 years over there. Infant, I even moved back to India. So from Beria, I moved back to India for about 10 years. And then I relocated back to Austin after we got acquired.
So it was a pretty good experience overall. So Bay Area was growing at the time. It is still growing of course. Things keep changing all the time in the Bay Area. So the transition was pretty smooth over there. No concerns, of course, right? So I liked all the kind of work culture over there. I did my own startup as well over there, which is the standard culture, of course, in the Bay Area, right?
Would it have been harder to do that in India? I mean, I don't know what the startup scene is in India. It has improved significantly, but at that time it was not as big. Huge in India. It's growing significantly right now. Absolutely. Really interesting. Being in Austin also it's a kind of good experience. It's a change certainly from Bay Area, India to Austin. I love the city as well. Absolutely. Yeah.
Every time I get a new stereo component, I always play Phil Collins just to test out the bass. Yeah, it's a good song. And he has excellent songs, right? So this is something which I love as well. Very good. The third one which I chose, this was also an interesting one, and this is a movie which I watched a large number of times, I'm sure you have as well, The Sound of Music. So the song is my favorite thing, Raindrops and Roses and Riskers and Kittens.
So this is, I don't know who originally sang the song, but because it was a play first and then after that it was converted into a movie. In the movie, I believe Julie Andrews is the one who sang that song. Right, so when it's a beautiful song. Good thing. You need to appreciate little things in life. That's really where it is. And those are the things that make you happy. That is very wise and makes me appreciate the song even more. And thank you.
så mycket, Diraj, för att hitta excellent songs med excellent thoughts behind dem. And thank you very much for coming on our podcast. And thanks a lot, Steve. It was a great conversation. So it's good to see that. In fact, you, in fact, your day job as well as in fact this podcast, you're focusing on some of the right, in fact, some of the technologies which are going to take this whole IoT and machine learning kind of forward as well.
Rachel, thanks a lot for having me here and it was great to talk to you. Thank you. So that was Diraj Sagani. Super knowledgeable and I really had a sense of deja vu. Resonance in a lot of the points that he brought up around system level thinking, especially certainly the way we in my day job look at things. And so I feel really good about the fact that we were able to.
Someone who is really knowledgeable from a really key company in this IoT space to join us on the show. Thank you for joining us on the show. Thank you very much to Aaron Hammack for editing it. I look forward to seeing you all on our next show. In the meantime, please be safe and treat each other well. Thanks again for engaging with us and being part of the Mr. Beacon podcast.
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