Arm wants to accelerate IoT development

Arm, used to develop processor architecture designs and licensing them for other companies to develop their own chips, recently announced Arm Total Solutions for IoT, with the aim of simplifying the development of IoT (Internet of Things) solutions and thus accelerating product launches for developers, OEMs and service providers at all stages of the IoT value chain.

The foundation of Arm’s business is based on portability and compatibility, i.e. specifying in its architectures a set of rules that determine how the hardware should work when a particular instruction is executed. This is the way to ensure that when software is written in compliance with these specifications, the processor or chipset will always work in the same way. This is the general basis of Arm’s promise.

Honoring this fundamental concept of the company, Arm has developed the new Arm Total Solutions for IoT to accelerate the development of IoT solutions. The core of the solution is Arm Corstone, a subsystem that brings together everything needed to start designing SoCs (System on Chip) faster and more securely.

Another key element of Arm Total Solutions for IoT, the Arm Virtual Hardware Targets cloud service, is a cloud-based abstraction layer. It’s as if developers have access to a virtual version of a chip before it materializes into physical hardware. In this way, the platform enables software development for IoT regardless of what actual processor it will work with. It also applies modern development practices, such as Agile, DevOps, and continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), for IoT and artificial intelligence applications for endpoints and allows for rapid testing of complex configurations of multiple devices in a virtual way, simulating, for example, memory and peripheral dependencies.

According to Arm, using Arm Total Solutions for IoT, product design cycles and deployments can be reduced by up to two years. “With this radical shift in the way systems are designed, Arm aims to drive a new IoT economy that rivals the mode, speed, and size of the smartphone app economy,” says Mohamed Awad, vice president of IoT and Integrated Solutions at Arm.

Arm Virtual Hardware is available in the AWS Marketplace. According to the company, partners are already using the solution to innovate faster and reduce time to market.

Promote standardization

To enable industry members to offer their software and services for a wide variety of platforms, Arm is also investing in the Centauri Project. The idea is to promote standardization by providing a set of standards for devices and platforms as well as reference implementations for startup projects involving device boot, security, and cloud integration.

Centauri Project APIs are PSA Certified compliant, a security certification scheme for hardware, software, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and Open-CMSIS-CDI, a specification that minimizes the effort required to enable cloud solutions and real-time operating systems.

To date, Arm partners have sold more than 70 billion devices based on Arm Cortex-M, a processor family optimized for low-cost, low-power microcontrollers, ideal for IoT applications, industrial and consumer devices. Chips for IoT are forecast to show a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 15% by 2026. Arm’s goal is to ensure that its IoT ecosystem is at the forefront of innovation by making its architecture increasingly affordable. And, according to the company, Arm Total Solutions for IoT is just one of the ways to do that.