- Tech giants partner to develop smart home standard
- CHIP alliance to take open-source approach
- Aims to develop unified connectivity standard for smart home tech
The new working group plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet.
The Connected Home over IP (CHIP) project aims to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. It will build upon internet protocol (IP) to enable communication across smart home devices – which can range from connected speakers to smart TVs and smart light bulbs – with mobile apps and cloud services.
It will take an open-source approach using contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others to develop a new unified conntectivity standard.
Apple, Amazon and Google all already support a number of smart home devices, be it the Apple TV or the Amazon Alexa. The Zigbee Alliance is made up of companies such as Ikea, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian.
The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and working group members “encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today”, CHIPs said in a press release.
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