NXP's Smart Home Innovation Lab

What’s the secret to developing a great new idea? Collaboration. Because when people come together to achieve a common goal, the result is always greater than its parts. This philosophy is at the heart of NXP. Put simply, we are brighter together.

This idea that collaboration is an essential part of innovation is what led us to develop our new Smart Home Innovation Lab in Austin, Texas. Five years in the making, this new, multi-million-dollar facility will accelerate advanced device development. From the ground up, this new lab will foster even closer collaboration between NXP and you — our many community partners. In addition to state-of-the-art engineering resources, it also features interactive, furnished smart-home spaces that allow engineers to immediately test infrastructure solutions in an active home environment.

It’s a place where people can come together to pioneer breakthroughs that ensure tomorrow’s smart homes are better, safer and more secure. We can better address the many complex issues related to the home of tomorrow, for both developers and end users. Together we will deliver on the promise and vision of the Autonomous Home. And, as a global hub for smart-home innovation, our lab will provide a cutting-edge education and collaboration space not just for our customers and corporate partners, but also for our university partners, aspiring students, and so many more.

Not Your Typical Engineering Lab

This new space is unlike any innovation lab I’ve ever seen. Staffed with more than 25 of our advanced solution system engineers, the 5,200-square-foot space replicates a fully furnished home environment, complete with entryway, kitchen, living room, media room, bedroom, gym, and garage, along with active engineering benches equipped with the latest tools and equipment, and a spacious conference room for in-person and virtual collaboration. There’s also a tech showcase of finished projects, which serves as starting points for future development and enhancement, so we can continue to push our ideas ever forward.

The unique lab setup allows us to anticipate new use cases and advance the user experience well beyond what we can normally do in a traditional lab setting. It allows us to immerse ourselves in real environments, to ensure new solutions are easy to use, easy to fix, and that they look great in our homes.

Designed for Developers, Focused on Consumers

At its core, the Smart Home Innovation Lab is designed to help our partners spend more time on innovation and less time overcoming the complex challenges of development.

The lab is equipped to help developers address critical challenges in the design of smart-home solutions. As a valued partner, we’re invested in helping developers tackle important issues like the advanced integration of technology, including managing multiple hubs, working with proprietary, open-source and DIY solutions, provisioning and removing devices, local edge processing and ease of use. The lab also makes it easier to enhance safety and security, from the standpoints of physical protection, network protection and how best to manage and control private content on local and cloud resources. For example, developers can even explore new ways to support fault tolerance and anomaly detection, and voice recognition in noisy areas.

The lab is also equipped to highlight the latest ways we’re addressing what really matters to consumers—the user experience. That includes features like seamless device interoperability, intuitive voice control, immersive multimedia and entertainment, precise localization, trusted networks, efficient energy management, advanced wearables and healthier living.

But, unlike other labs I’ve seen, our new Smart Home Innovation Lab goes beyond showcasing our own unique solutions to providing a foundation for future development. The lab also encourages students and aspiring innovators to work with the latest and most advanced technologies, and lets us all preview the exciting new smart-home technologies we can look forward to using.

Previewed on Tomorrow’s World Today

Last year, as we were putting the finishing touches on the project, our Smart Home Innovation Lab attracted the attention of George Davison, an enthusiastic tech ambassador and host of Tomorrow’s World Today, an innovation-inspired series on the Science and Discovery Channels.

The Tomorrow’s World Today crew paid a visit to Austin and made the lab the focus of the season six premiere. It’s a nice way to get a virtual tour of the space, and see some of the more than 20 partner collaborations and nearly 30 active technology projects already in place at the lab.

Austin Is the Logical Choice

We decided to locate the Smart Home Innovation Lab here for a number of reasons. To begin with, NXP has had a home in Austin for more than 50 years and this lab is evidence that we remain passionately committed to the local area. In addition to being home to some of our significant manufacturing operations, Austin is a vital center for NXP research and development (R&D) in a variety of areas, including Internet of Things (IoT) and the Smart Home.

Also, the importance of the region’s talent pipeline cannot be overstated. This lab will play an important role in preparing the next generation of talent for careers in the semiconductor industry and will serve as an extension of NXP’s long-standing local education partnerships. The lab also serves as an investment in Austin itself, to help the city continue to thrive as a global technology hub with a prominent position in the US semiconductor industry.

Join Us

The Smart Home Innovation Lab is just one more example of how NXP fosters collaboration. Whether it’s working with other industry leaders to define the new Matter standard, building an ecosystem of partners to streamline smart-home development or fostering new talent at local universities, we recognize the value of bringing people together to share perspectives, skills and experiences.

In many ways, the Innovation Lab embodies our core mission as a company – to bring together technology’s brightest minds to build game-changing solutions that propel us forward.

But really, this lab is for all of us involved in helping Smart Home evolve and succeed. Now that the lab is fully operational, we want everyone to be part of the picture. We invite our industry partners and customers to come work with us, shoulder to shoulder, and we invite our many university partners and aspiring students to enter a new world of educational and skill development and consider a career at NXP.

Take the Next Step

We invite you to join us in our new Innovation Lab and to learn more about how we’re using collaboration to take smart home to the next level. Please reach out to us at smart.home@nxp.com

Author: Ron Martino

Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at NXP Semiconductors

Ron Martino is executive vice president and general manager of Edge Processing for NXP Semiconductors. In this role, he is responsible for driving embedded compute leadership for edge processing in industrial, IoT and networking markets. Ron is an established leader with over 30 years of experience in the microelectronics business focused on automotive electronics, embedded processing applications, high performance computing applications and semiconductor research and development.