ARM is Attending the Problems Associated with IoT’s Fragmentation

ARM is the leading company that designs the semiconductor for IoT and smartphones. The company has recently made an announcement upon three new projects. These projects intend to develop IoT to make it faster, easier, and potentially secure. All of the three projects are being announced under the brand name ARM Total Solutions for the Internet of Things.

As per the commitments of ARM, they will firstly offer pre-defined hardware capabilities. These capabilities will seem common to that of the IoT Chip manufacturers, ARM Corstone. And then, ARM is planning upon introducing its abstraction layer for the IP, which is based on Cornerstone, within the cloud. Hence, this allowed the developers to take privilege upon the accessibility of the chip virtually before it is executed in the hardware.

ARM is also proposing to launch Project Centuari. Under this project, the developers will have the potential of using cloud-native software across diverse IoT Chips and their variations. It is not the first time that ARM has come up to solve the IoT challenges! Earlier in 2014, ARM tried to deal with IoT’s fragmentation problem with the use of mbed OS. ARM had plans back then to unify the real-time OS and put them in use across the IoT’s microcontrollers. But, the idea didn’t work fruitfully!

But, this time in 2021, ARM has tried to attack several problems with its ideal solution. The company had used its expertise in the field of building ecosystems for implementing cloud computing solutions. This idea was to propose development practices such as CD/CI and DevOps from the era of cloud computing to IoT development solutions.

But before infusing these aspects, ARM has the ideology to get rid of the timeline problem. As soon as ARM announces a new design for a processor, all of the other chip companies take that IP for building the silicon. And this takes around a year or more before the processor chips are readily available for the developers to build new devices and IoT products. After the chipset is out, the device developers or makers need to build their hardware & software and test it for seamless execution.

The building, testing, and the validating process might take around 3 to 5 years, which is a vast time to wait for. ARM proposed the Corstone plan for solving this delay problem. The virtual hardware target also intends to assist the cause. With all of the Corstone chip companies such as Qualcomm, NXP, and others, basic processors were easily made that consisted of pre-defined firmware and hardware for all of the common IoT applications. Some of such common applications are machine learning, security, software updates, and others.

ARM is currently examining this idea with its Silicon customers. And this test is not recent but has been conducted for the past few years.

ARM is ready to offer a virtual version of the complete Corstone Package within the cloud. Hence, the developers can now start building their software for the products using the dedicated chips right after the architecture is released.

Credit: The credit for this informative update about ARM goes to Stacey on IoT. Visit this link to get a clear description of more in-depth details.