“Total Solutions for IoT” Virtual Dev Platform Cuts Lifecycles by up to Two Years

October 21, 2021

Story

IP vendors layers cloud-based virtual hardware emulator on top of reference IP to accelerate IoT application software development.

Arm announced “Total Solutions for IoT” at their DevSummit earlier this week. The offering is a suite of hardware/software co-design solutions for accelerating product development across cores like the Cortex-M55 CPU, Ethos-U55 neural processor, AHB5 TrustZone, single- or dual-port flash controllers, a random number generator, and other components.

The Corstone 300 reference packages, Arm’s reference architectures for designing complete SoCs based on their technology, serve as the foundation of this first version of the Total Solutions for IoT offering. 

The company has layered on its new “Arm Virtual Hardware” emulator technology on top of this to provide accurate digital models of these Corstone reference SoCs, which allows application developers to build and test software before silicon is available. The package also integrates “Project Centauri,” a selection of APIs that assist with project security and design scalability.

In addition, the Total Solutions for IoT includes tools like machine learning models, application-specific reference code, etc. that help simplify the end-to-end development process.

Mohamed Awad, the company’s VP of IoT and Embedded, says that the virtual toolchain can reduce design cycles by as much as two years. 

Arm Virtual Hardware: Real-World Approximations, Beta-Class Pricing

Virtual Hardware models provide cycle-approximate execution information that can estimate how fast a given machine learning or general-purpose workload would operate on real hardware. It does so by accounting for memory usage, peripherals, and so on.

The Virtual Hardware modeling tool is hosted in the cloud, and free to developers while they’re still in beta. Cloud infrastructure costs are even being offset by the company, who has partnered with AWS to provide “more than 100 hours of free AWS EC2 credits for the first 1,000 users who register on the Arm website.”

Project Centauri: Security & Scalability, Simplified

Project Centauri APIs ease code portability for Total Solutions users by specifying device-to-cloud reference implementations based on native support for Open-CMSIS-CDI and the PSA Certified security architecture. 

These implementations standardize device boot, cloud integration, and security implementations for Cortex-M targets, thereby reducing the burden of refactoring software for different OSs and cloud platforms.

Start Your Software

Arm Total Solutions for IoT is available now. Arm Virtual Hardware is also available now on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

But the company is not done. They have published a roadmap for Total Solutions for IoT that includes additional architectures like Kochab, Olympus, Polaris, and Zaphod, as well as releases around AI-based application infrastructure. 

For more information, check out the roadmap diagram below or visit arm.com.