We started with instrumentation: together with its vast ecosystem, Arm provided the core technology for adding microcontrollers to billions of devices at scale. The industry then turned to inter-connectivity, and from Bluetooth to 5G we now have a wealth of options for connecting these “things” together.
Three Phases of the Internet of Things
We’re now entering a third phase of the IoT: intelligence. This phase is about bringing new technologies and services together across billions and billions of endpoints in a global infrastructure, all the way through to the cloud. Getting this right means enabling new ways to improve human productivity, drive economic growth, and create opportunities that solve some of the world’s toughest problems, fueling a new IoT economy that rivals the shape, speed, and size of the smartphone industry’s ‘App Economy.’
Transforming IoT Design
To seize this opportunity and to mobilize the IoT ecosystem now, Arm in October 2021 introduced a profound change to IoT design: Arm Total Solutions for IoT. This industry first is built on three pillars:
Arm Total Solutions for IoT are based on standards. For Linux-based systems, Project Cassini and Arm SystemReady ease the use and deployment of cloud-native software development at the edge.
Project Centauri brings homogeneity to Cortex-M based IoT endpoints, enabling software leverage at scale across diverse Arm-based hardware. PSA Certified enables the security required for IoT.
Arm Virtual Hardware is an evolution of our modeling technology that addresses the new realities of IoT development. It delivers accurate models of Arm-based SoCs, Corstone, and third-party hardware, providing mechanisms for simulating memory, peripherals, and more to enable the development and testing of software before silicon availability resulting in a shift-left in the entire IoT product design cycle with faster time to market for all. This transformation trims years off product design cycles and empowers everyone to spend less time integrating and more time building great products and services. Thanks to the cloud, Arm Virtual Hardware provides an easy way to scale your software test infrastructure to both improve quality and increase the cadence of software releases. On the hardware side, the IP is available through Arm Flexible Access. On the software side, you have free access to the complete Total Solutions Software Development Kit today on Arm’s Github.
You can run those SDKs – and the software you develop – on Arm Virtual Hardware, available as an Amazon Machine Image on the AWS Marketplace. This combination of the Arm Virtual Hardware AMI and the Total Solution SDK is integrated with some of the most popular CI/CD workflows like Github Runner.
Head to Arm's Github and enter 'Total Solutions' into the GitHub search bar to find all Total Solutions repositories.
Auspicious Beginnings: First Configurations of Arm Total Solutions for IoT
The first Arm Total Solution addressed general-purpose compute and ML workload use cases, including an ML-based voice keyword recognition example. It supports multiple configurations of the Arm Corstone-300 platform, incorporating Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55 processors. Users can choose from these configurations and apply them to their specific workloads. It is available in the cloud for immediate access to test.
The ecosystem embraced this design approach and the new tools and platforms we provided to simplify and modernize software development. But we didn't stop there. In the Spring of 2022, we've added even more to Arm Total Solutions for IoT.
Arm's roadmap will cover applications such as voice recognition and object recognition.