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 interconnectivity, and from Bluetooth to 5G we now have a wealth of options for connecting these “things” together.
Three Phases of the Internet of Things
Today, we’re 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. If we get this right, we will enable 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.’
A vision that transforms IoT design.
To seize this opportunity and to mobilize the IoT ecosystem now, Arm is introducing a radical change to IoT design with its Arm Total Solutions for IoT – an industry first that brings together best-in-class, specialized processing solutions for specific IoT use cases along with application-specific reference software and tools including Arm Virtual Hardware. Arm Total Solutions for IoT are based on standards. For Linux-based systems, Project Cassini and Arm SystemReady enable the use of cloud-native software development at the edge and ease deployment across
different Arm-based platforms. 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.
Another key aspect of Arm Total Solutions for IoT – Arm Virtual Hardware – is an evolution of our modeling technology that addresses the new realities of IoT development. It delivers accurate functional models of Arm-based SoCs, providing mechanisms for simulating memory, peripherals and more, enabling 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. We believe this is the beginning of a new era for IoT – one of true hardware/software system-level co-design. This transformation takes years off of 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 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 the first beta release of Arm Virtual Hardware, available as an Amazon Machine Image on the AWS Marketplace (Not currently available on AWS in Mainland China). 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.
First Configurations of Arm Total Solutions for IoT – Available Now
The first Arm Total Solution addresses general purpose compute and ML workload use cases, including an ML-based voice keyword recognition example. It is available today and supports multiple configurations of the Arm Corstone-300 platform, incorporating Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55 processors. Users will be able to choose from these configurations and apply them to their specific workload, significantly accelerating and optimizing their development cycle. It is available in the cloud for immediate access to test.
Examples of Total Solutions for IoT packages.
Arm's roadmap will cover applications such as voice recognition and object recognition.
