As part of its ongoing initiative to provide innovative systems solutions for industrial and smart home energy management, NXP Semiconductors announced that its continued strategic collaboration with geo (Green Energy Options Ltd.), the leading provider of residential energy management solutions, enabled the launch of geo’s SeeZero home energy management system (HEMS), a revolutionary MatterTM-certified HEMS and one of the first HEMS designed to support true mass market deployment.
This collaboration leverages geo's deep experience in energy management and NXP's intelligent system solutions for Matter, which integrate the key building blocks of both software and hardware for connectivity, processing and security, allowing the companies to pioneer this solution. SeeZero makes it easy and intuitive for consumers to control their energy consumption and reduce energy costs. At the same time, it enables grid operators and generators to better manage the rapid transition to electrified residential transport and heating, as well as the accelerating growth of renewable energy.
Matter is a game-changing interoperability standard supporting seamless connectivity and control between devices to enable autonomous homes and buildings. With adoption rapidly expanding, Matter’s latest iteration includes a growing focus on energy management and new energy device types, such as HVAC, EV chargers, water heaters, solar and battery storage systems and even smart meters, as well as a full range of more traditional smart home devices. Home energy management systems enabled by Matter are critical in allowing consumers to exploit the full benefit of modern, smart appliances to minimize energy cost and maximize comfort and convenience throughout the autonomous home.
As a comprehensive system solutions provider for Matter and an active driver of and contributor to the growing Matter standard, NXP is helping to build energy ecosystem collaborations that bring new sustainable, autonomous and reliable electrification solutions to market. geo’s SeeZero HEMS, powered by NXP, optimizes a home’s overall energy use automatically, making sure consumer preferences for how their smart home appliances work are always met, while avoiding high energy cost periods and making the most of low cost points to keep bills low, and at the same time reduce strain on the electricity grid.
“Home energy management is a key driver for consumers to adopt smart home technology,” said Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which oversees the Matter standard. “Matter 1.4 expands the standard’s energy management capabilities by adding support for new device types, enabled by member companies like NXP, helping to expand the Matter ecosystem so consumers can more effectively manage home energy costs and consumption.”
“Matter-enabled devices are key to efficiently managing energy throughout the autonomous home,” said Charles Dachs, senior vice president and general manager, Industrial and IoT Edge Processing, NXP. “NXP’s portfolio of processing, connectivity, and security system solutions make it easier for developers to quickly innovate and bring new types of Matter-enabled devices to market. This system approach is key to building a broader energy ecosystem driven by autonomy that delivers new smart home energy management solutions to market.”
“Consumers face a dilemma: they want to make the best of the ‘smartness’ in the devices they buy to make their homes as comfortable and convenient as possible, but they also need to keep their energy costs low,” said Steve Cunningham, CEO, geo. “The autonomous, invisible orchestration of energy usage, powered by Matter, is critical to solving that challenge and NXP has been a key collaborator for geo in our journey to deliver that orchestration and move the world closer to net zero. The breadth and functionality of their Matter solutions and ability to work hand-in-glove with our developers to integrate those solutions into our design was fundamental to geo achieving the critical balance of capability, complexity and cost needed to bring our revolutionary SeeZero HEMS solution to market.”
The SeeZero HEMS and SeeZero smart thermostat are designed to work together in an intelligent home to help reduce energy bills and carbon footprints, while supporting a more flexible grid. This helps to move homes closer to net zero emissions.
SeeZero solutions utilize several devices from NXP’s broad portfolio of Matter solutions. This includes the i.MX RT1060 crossover MCU. Designed for industrial and IoT applications, the i.MX RT1060 family utilizes an Arm® Cortex®-M7 core for real-time performance and features high integration and 1 MB on-chip RAM. The i.MX RT1060 family is supported by NXP’s broadly adopted MCUXpresso ecosystem, which includes an SDK, a choice of IDEs and secure provisioning and configuration tools to enable rapid development.
SeeZero leverages NXP’s K32W0x portfolio of wireless MCUs, designed to power ultra-low-current multiprotocol wireless IoT devices with support for Matter, IEEE 802.15.4 mesh network protocols Zigbee and Thread, and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0. The portfolio supports expanded memory optimized to facilitate home and building automation, including smart energy solutions. SeeZero also incorporates NXP’s 88W8801 2.4 GHz Single-Band 1x1 Wi-Fi solution. NXP’s 88W8801 is a highly integrated, single-band (2.4 GHz) Wi-Fi 4 1x1 system-on-chip, specifically designed to support high throughput data rates.