Enabling Workload Portability in a Diverse and Fragmented IoT Value Chain

Project Centauri: Standards
That Drive ScaleCloud-based development is becoming a key technology across multiple markets, and Arm has helped enabled this with activities such as Project Cassini for the edge and SOAFEE for automotive. The new IoT economy needs technologies within IoT to achieve the pace and scale of the cloud-native, DevOps- and MLOps-driven software development lifecycle that has revolutionized the data center.

Project Centauri does this by drawing upon and including Arm's rich portfolio of Cortex-M software, bringing together complementary initiatives under a single MCU software strategy. These initiatives have laid the foundation for Arm Total Solutions for IoT, giving the entire value chain foundational standards, such as Open-CMSIS-Pack, secure device management with PSA Certified and Trusted Firmware-M, and ecosystem support for use case-specific IoT solutions.Project Centauri standardizes aspects of the system that enable software leverage across diverse hardware. This gives IoT partners that want to provide cloud services, real-time operating systems, and platform software packages the leverage to scale. Project Centauri also includes our work on Trusted Firmware-M, which provides a reference implementation aligned with PSA Certified.

Through project Centauri, we are laying the groundwork to help scale IoT so partners across the value chain don’t need to worry about it.

A huge opportunity: The market for IoT silicon was $9 billion last year and is expected to expand to almost $19 billion in 2025.

While based on the same core pillars as Project Cassini, Project Centauri will deliver standards and software specific to the Cortex-M architecture. This includes existing and new initiatives from Arm and partners with a renewed focus on widespread adoption and enabling a rapid path to scale.

Standards

Open-CMSIS-Pack has launched as a Linaro incubation project to deliver the infrastructure to integrate and manage software components and improve code reuse across embedded and IoT projects.
Open-CMSIS-CDI joins this as an initiative to deliver key abstraction layers for cloud-connected IoT devices.

Security

Arm and partners will continue to build upon the success of PSA Certified in raising the security bar across IoT and embedded.
Arm is making a renewed investment in Trusted Firmware-M to make it more widely adoptable as an accelerated path to PSA Certification.

Ecosystem

Arm is working with innovative partners across areas such as low/no-code development, ML Ops, and cloud services to unlock step changes in scale to the entire ecosystem.

When we launched Project Centauri last year, we talked about CMSIS-Pack which specifies how to package and deliver software components from various vendors. By creating a common format that can be used within any developer environment, software vendors can scale their offerings across the 9,500 microcontrollers and 450 boards that have already supported CMSIS-Pack and it continues to see great momentum.We are working with Linaro on Open-CMSIS-CDI which will define a common device interface for MCU devices used in the IoT to enable IoT applications to be portable across virtual and physical devices.We also have the Open-IoT-SDK, a reference implementation built around the Centauri standards. This standardization of best practices and common ways of working is going to be a long journey for the IoT market but the momentum we are seeing in Project Centauri shows that the ecosystem truly values this work.

Project Centauri standardizes aspects of the system that enable software leverage across diverse hardware. Find out more about Project Centauri here.