Sigma Designs Unlocks the Full Potential of the Smart Home with Next Generation Z-Wave 700-Series Chipset

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 08, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CES 2018 Venetian Ballroom – Sigma Designs® (NASDAQ:SIGM), a leading provider of intelligent system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for smart home IoT, today unveils its new 700-Series Z-Wave platform, which include numerous performance and technological enhancements in energy-efficiency and RF performance, while being cost-effective, built to power the context-aware smart home.

Z-Wave 700-Series is a long range, low power and future-proof hardware platform with integrated software tools and building blocks enabling a whole new generation of Z-Wave sensor devices. 700-Series will drive the battery-powered device trend, empowering Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems to utilize sensor data and make smart homes smarter, safer, and more connected.

“Sigma’s Z-Wave 700-Series chip will completely reshape the meaning of smart home. It solves for many of today’s technological barriers, while being the most flexible, interoperable platform, bringing smart home functionality to a new level,” said Raoul Wijgergangs, VP of Sigma Designs’ Z-Wave Business Unit. “700-Series opens opportunities for new classes of sensors that weren’t possible before, while making remarkable improvements to existing device categories. 700-Series is creating a path to full home installations, moving from tens of Z-Wave devices to hundreds of Z-Wave devices per home. Our new platform assures the environment that will take homes from smart to truly intelligent.”

Key features of the 700-Series platform include:

  • Low power: 700-Series will have best-in-class low power radio performance enabling multiyear battery lifetime and more than 10-year sensor lifetime on a coin-cell.
  • Long range: 700-Series platform will enable range of more than 300 feet, covering multi-stories in a house and the far end of the yard.
  • Low cost and fast time to market: 700-Series gets developers started fast with low cost developer kits, tools and readymade certified reference code ensuring minimum time from prototype to certified product.
  • High performance: Powerful ARM®-based platform with large memory on the chip and many peripherals, enabling intelligence at the edge with fast energy efficient computation and secure inclusion in less than one second.
  • Certified interoperable and backwards compatible: Every 700-Series device will have the highest level of security in the smart home with Z-Wave Security 2 (S2) framework and consistent easy install with Z-Wave SmartStart.

The energy-efficient and long range wireless communication with the 700-Series Z-Wave platform, allows smart home sensors to go beyond the current limits. This means that smart homes can extend to the yard, the end of the driveway and seamlessly cover multiple stories in a home. The extremely low power consumption enables new small form factor Z-Wave sensors which can be embedded into new places such as into furniture, windows and even behind dry walls.

The 700-Series platform will continue to utilize and build on top of core Z-Wave features such as S2 and SmartStart. Sigma’s Security 2 (S2) architecture, which combines existing and new security features, allows Z-Wave to continue to be the safest, most secure ecosystem of smart devices on the global market. SmartStart is an easy way to automatically create and configure Z-Wave networks for instant device installation success. Comprising the new Z-Wave protocol and gateway software layers, SmartStart pre-configures devices to the network before they reach the home, dramatically reducing installation time, and thereby costs, to maximize return on investment (ROI) for installers and remove difficulty of DIY installations for homeowners.