Panasonic Industry Europe is now offering PAN-MaX, a comprehensive Matter Certificate Service designed to streamline Matter enablement for smart home device manufacturers.
The Matter standard, developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), aims to address the fragmented smart home market by ensuring interoperability among devices from different manufacturers. This standard supports familiar wireless communication technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and Thread, enabling devices to communicate seamlessly. Additionally, Matter incorporates IoT device security to prevent unauthentic product copies, making it a foundational technology for the consolidation of the smart home market.
Panasonic Industry, a provider of component-level solutions for PCB designs, offers Matter enablement through its range of wireless modules. These modules provide the necessary wireless interfaces (BLE, Thread, and Wi-Fi) required by the Matter standard, and are complemented by PAN-MaX, a digital trust solution that addresses production-related challenges for smart home device manufacturers.
PAN-MaX integrates with Panasonic’s wireless modules to provide all the capabilities needed for creating a Matter product. This service simplifies Matter deployment by incorporating manufacturer-specific versions of Panasonic wireless modules. Panasonic handles the implementation of the digital trust solution, including the injection of Device Attestation Certificates (DACs) issued from a Panasonic-managed PKI infrastructure into compatible wireless modules. These DACs are signed against a root certificate issued by a CSA-approved Product Attestation Authority. Additionally, Panasonic’s European production facilities can pre-program business logic and other customer-specific information into the wireless modules during production.
The PAN-MaX Matter Certificate Service includes:
- PKI Infrastructure: X.509 certificate injection into Panasonic wireless modules, signed by Panasonic as PAI
- Programming of business logic (device/application firmware) and Matter certification declaration on compatible wireless modules during production in Panasonic’s European facility
- Organisation of device certification at a CSA-approved Test Service Provider upon request
PAN-MaX can be customised to meet individual customer and project requirements, with different service levels available: Silver, Gold, or Diamond. This flexibility allows device manufacturers to choose a service tier that suits their budget and needs, facilitating Matter enablement without requiring additional production-related investments.
“Panasonic’s dual-pronged approach to Matter enablement is a unique effort in our industry,” explained Dr. Chetan Joshi, Lead Product Manager, IoT Devices at Panasonic Industry Europe. “For an engineering manager setting the project scope for designing a Matter product, working with Panasonic allows streamlining the supply chain, as Panasonic can provide both certified wireless interfaces with an optimal radio performance of the product, as well as PAN-MaX as the chain of digital trust required to go into production for Matter.”
Stressing the importance of the efficiency gains stemming from the one-stop shop set-up, Dr. Joshi added: “Panasonic Industry seeks to democratise Matter for device manufacturers seeking to play in the connected smart-home market by taking over the bulk of efforts on wireless connectivity and device security, such that device manufacturers can continue to focus on delivering the core value of their business to their customers.”
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