It’s undeniable: 2014 was the year when the electronics industry decidedly and collectively moved forward to push the Internet of Things (IoT). In year 2015 IoT markets will continue to grow. I think we’re going to see some critical mass on corralling the IoT in 2015. IoT is a young market – no one seems to be clearly leading. Communications are the key here. Over the last 10 years the world has done a remarkably good job of connecting the global wireless world. The last decade has radically changed the way we live. The smartphone and its cousin, the tablet, was the final link to ubiquitous wireless coverage, globally. The fantasy of the IoT is quite grand: everything on the planet can be smart and communicate. The idea is both powerful and impractical.
IoT is entering peak of inflated expectations: The Internet of Things is at that stage when the efforts of various companies involved in it, along with research, are proving to have a lot of promise. At this stage, the Internet of Things should not have too many difficulties attracting developers and researchers into the fold. As we turn to 2015 and beyond, however, wearables becomes an explosive hardware design opportunity. Tie the common threads of IoT and wearables together, and an unstoppable market movement emerges. There seems to be a lack of public appreciation of the extent to which the Internet of Things is going to fundamentally change how people interact with the world around them.
On the other hand, the Internet of Things is getting poised to enter the trough of disillusionment, which means that there is more room for failure now. There are issues of security, privacy, and sharing of information across vertical implementations that still need to be worked out. Until they are, the IoT will not be able to fulfill all its promises.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to grow significantly, as consumers, businesses, and governments recognize the benefit of connecting inert devices to the internet. The ‘Internet of Things’ Will Be The World’s Most Massive Device Market And Save Companies Billions Of Dollars in few years. BI Intelligence expects that the IoT will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019. This includes hardware, software, installation costs, management services, and economic value added from realized IoT efficiencies. The main benefit of growth in the IoT will be increased efficiency and lower costs: increased efficiency within the home, city, and workplace. The enterprise sector will lead the IoT, accounting for 46% of device shipments this year, but that share will decline as the government and home sectors gain momentum. I expect that home, government, and enterprise sectors use the IoT differently.
The IoT is only enabled because of two things: the ability of networks to reach countless nodes, and the availability of cost-effective embedded processors to attach to a multitude of devices. The prices for components and devices continues to decline while the skyrocketing global demand for 24/7 Internet access grows exponentially. The Internet of Things growth will benefit mostly from the autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity that will make up the bulk of the objects of the IoT. This is the main driver for double-digit growth across verticals in the electronics, and especially the semiconductor industry well into the next decade. The IoT will connect places, such as manufacturing platforms, energy grids, health-care facilities, transportation systems, retail outlets, sports and music venues, and countless other entities to the Internet.
Internet of Things can become Engineering for Everyone. The emergence of open-source development platforms, developed and maintained by dedicated volunteers, has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms. The availability of open-source software and, more recently, hardware targeting embedded applications means that access to high-quality engineering resources has never been greater. This has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms to turn their own abstract concepts into real products. With the potential to launch a successful commercial venture off the back of tinkering with some low-cost hardware in your spare time, it’s no wonder that open-source hardware is fuelling an entirely new movement. A new generation of manufacturer is embracing the open-source ethos and actually allowing customers to modify the product post-sale.
Exact size predictions for IoT market next few years vary greatly, but all of the firms making these predictions agree on one thing—it’s going to be very big.
In year 2014 very many chip vendors and sensor algorithm companies also jumped on the IoT bandwagon, in hopes of laying the groundwork for more useful and cost-effective IoT devices. Sensors, MCUs, and wireless connectivity are three obvious building blocks for IoT end-node devices. Wireless connectivity and software (algorithms) are the two most sought-after technologies. Brimming with excitement, and with Europe already ahead of the pack, a maturing semiconductor industry looks expectantly to the Internet of Things (IoT) for yet another facelift. The IC sales generated by the connectivity and sensor subsystems to enabled this IoT will amount $57.7 billion in 2015.
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner as automotive V2X, LED lighting and smart domestic objects are set to drive semiconductor market growth through the year 2020, according to market analysis firm Gartner. The move to create billions of smart, autonomously communicating objects known as the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for low-power sensors, processors and communications chips. By 2018, the market value of IoT subsystems in equipment and Internet-connected things is projected to reach $103.6 billion worldwide, which represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0 percent from $39.8 billion in 2013.
BI Intelligence expects that by 2019 IoT market will be more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and the wearable market combined. A new report by Yole Developpement pegs the market size in the $70 billion range by 2018, with the next five years presenting a golden opportunity for device makers as the IoT enters the growth stage. Device shipments will reach 6.7 billion in 2019 for a five-year CAGR of 61%.
Number of connected devices is expected to to reach 36 billion units by 2020, cautions that “all of this new market opportunity is under threat.” Other estimate according to market research firm Radiant Insights of San Francisco is that the number of Internet connections will grow from 9 billion devices in 2014 to 100 billion by 2020 (twice as many as the estimate from Cisco Systems Inc). IC Insights forecasts that web-connected things will account for 85 percent of 29.5 billion Internet connections worldwide by 2020. Currently fragmented market, the number of cellular M2M connections could rise from 478 million today to 639 million in 2020.
By 2024, the report predicts that overall market value for components will exceed of $400 billion, of which more than 10% will come from hardware alone. Revenue from hardware sales will be only $50 billion or 8% of the total revenue from IoT-specific efforts, as software makers and infrastructure companies will earn the lion’s share. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large.
The growth of the IoT will present some very interesting issues in a variety of areas. You will see some very fast activity because unless it gets resolved there will be no IoT as it is envisioned.
General consensus is that the interconnect protocol of the IoT will be IP (Internet Protocol). As it stands today, the deployment of the billions of IoT objects can’t happen, simply because there just aren’t enough IP addresses with IPv4. While there is still some discussion about how to connect the IoT, most are in agreement that the IoT protocol will be IPv6. The first step will be to convert all proprietary networks to an IP-base. Then, the implementation of IPv6 can begin. Because direct interoperability between IPv4 and iPv6 protocols is not possible, this will add some some complications to the development, resulting in a bit of obfuscation to the transition for IPv6.
Is There Any Way to Avoid Standards Wars in the Emerging Internet of Things? I don’t see that possible. IoT will be in serious protocol war in 2015. There is a wide selection of protocols, but no clear set of winners at the moment. The real IoT standardization is just starting – There are currently few standards (or regulations) for what is needed to run an IoT device. There is no single standard for connecting devices on the Internet of Thing, instead are a handful of competing standards run by different coalitions of companies: The Thread Group (Qualcomm, The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Panasonic), The Industrial Internet Consortium (Intel, Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft), Open Interconnect Consortium (Samsung, Intel, Dell), Physical Web (Google), AllSeen Alliance (Samsung, Intel, Dell) and huge number of smaller non-standardized protocols in use. Each of the standards vary how they do things.
Anyone who tries to build a physical layer and drive a software stack based on it all the way up to the application layer is a fool. But many companies try to do it this year. Today Zigbee is the most cost effective, but tomorrow WiFi will figure it out. On networking field in every few years there’s a new management protocol – what will happen in IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs.
Currently the IoT lacks a common set of standards and technologies that would allow for compatibility and ease-of-use. The IoT needs a set of open APIs and protocols that work with a variety of physical-layer networks. The IP and network layer should have nothing to do with the media. The fundamental issue here is that at the moment the Internet of Things will not have a standard set of open APIs for consumers. IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs. I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point.
It is not just technical protocol details that are problem: One problem with IoT is that it is a vague definition. Do we simply mean ‘connected devices? Or something else? One of the main issues, which will only get worse as the IoT evolves, is how are we going to categorize all the different objects.
Early in 2015, the Industrial Internet Consortium plans to wrap up work on a broad reference architecture for the Internet of Things, ramp up three test beds, and start identifying gaps where new standards may be needed. The group, formed by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM, and Intel, now has about 115 members and aims to make it easier to build commercial IoT systems. The IIC hopes to finish a first draft of its reference architecture by the end of January and have it ratified by March. It will define functional areas and the technologies and standards for them, from sensors to data analytics and business applications. The framework includes versions for vertical markets including aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities, and transportation. A breakout section on security also is in the works. Hopefully the reference architecture could be used to help people construct industrial IoT systems quickly and easily.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things, smart cars are beginning to garner more attention. Smart cars are different than connected cars, which are simply smartphones on wheels. Even though the technology has been on the evolutionary fast track, integration has been slow. For car manufacturers, it is a little tricky to accept driverless cars because it disrupts their fundamental business model: Private resources will evolve to shared resources, centrally controlled, since autonomous vehicles can be controlled remotely.
Over the next few years, we’ll see a torrent of new devices emerge that are connected to the Internet and each other through a wide range of different wireless networking protocols. As a result, there’s a race on, not just to get those devices connected, but also to provide the network infrastructure necessary to managing all of them at scale. WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks are nowadays widely used, nut new alternatives are coming to solve applications were those technologies are not most suitable. There are different plans for wide area wireless networks that use licensed or unlicensed wireless bandwidth to transmit small amounts of data from various connected device – this could create its own connection to them in a cost effective manner without relying on existing cellular or WiFi networks.
Recently we have developed a pressing need, or desire to put our refrigerators, and everything we have access to while mobile, on the net, morphing the brave new world of the Internet of Things, into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And that will make that last 100 meters—that final frontier of interconnect—a reality. Today, only about 10% of the last 100 meter devices that will make up the IoT are connected. As the IoT evolves, other small cells such as businesses, city centers, malls, theaters, stadiums, event centers, and the like, will connect much of what they have on premise (soda or popcorn machines, vending machines, restaurants, parking garages, ticket kiosks, seat assignments, and a very long list of others). And, there are a very large number of devices that are short-range in all of these various cells. What was once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters.
Plenty of people and companies in the technology world tend to come at the Internet of Things by dwelling on the “Internet.” But what if, instead, we started with the “Things?” Knowing intimately what “things” are supposed to do and how they think and behave will be the key to solving one of the IoT’s most pressing issues: application layers. Over the past 18 months, the industry has launched numerous consortia, from Qualcomm’s AllSeen and Intel’s Open Interconnect Consortium to Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Thread. Every entity says it’s targeting the “interoperability” of things at home, but each is obviously concentrating primarily on its own interests, and making their “layer” specifications slightly different from those pursued by others.
It seems that no industry consortium is particularly interested in defining — in gory detail — the specific functions of, say, what a door lock is supposed to do. The library of commands for each function already exists, but someone, or some group, has to translate those already determined commands into an IP-friendly format. One of the standards organizations will take up the challenge in 2015. This will be the first step to “knock barriers down for IoT” in 2015.
Missing today in the IoT are reliability and robustness. Consumers expect their light switched and other gadgets to be infinitely reliable. In many today’s products we seem to be far from reliable and robust operation. Today’s routers can relay traffic between networks, but they have no idea how to translate what functions each device attached to them wants to do, and how to communicate that to other devices. The network needs to be able to discover who else is on the network. Devices connected to network need to be able to discover what resources are available and what new devices are being added. The network needs to be extensible.
Despite the oft-mocked naming scheme, the Internet of Things (IoT) has an incredibly practical goal: connecting classically “dumb” objects—toasters, doorknobs, light switches—to the Internet, thereby unlocking a world of potential. Imagine what it means to interact with your home the same way you would a website, accessing it without geographic restriction. But there is one missing piece of the smart home revolution: smart home operating system. So what will be the system that capitalizes on the smart home in the same way, the enabler of all the applications and actions we want our homes to run and do? There are no ready answers for that yet. And there might not be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. It might be that the real potential for home automation lies not in local software running on a home device but in the cloud. I think that the cloud is going to be more important over time, but there will always be also need for some local functionality in case the connection to cloud is lost. Right now the Internet of Things is rather disjointed compared to Internet and computers.
When everything will be connected, how about security? In the path to IoT, the issue of data and device security looms large. Security for the ‘Internet of Things’ will be talked about very much in 2015 for a good reason. As Internet of Thigs becomes more and more used, it will be more hacked. Thus security of Internet of Things will be more and more talked about. Virtually anything connected to the Internet has the potential of being hacked, no matter how unlikely. Internet of Things devices often lack systematic protections against viruses or spam. Nowadays most security breaches are software-based, when an application can be compromised. Counter-measures for such attacks range from basic antivirus scanning software, to embedded hypervisors to hardware-bound secure applications tying their execution to uniquely identifiable hardware. There is emerging customer demand for silicon authentication. But the threats extend way beyond software and some hackers will put a lot of effort into compromising a system’s security at silicon-level. Individual devices can get hacked, but all systems should have some way of self-checking and redundancy. Those IoT systems can be very complex at device and system level. The problem with complexity is that you create more attack points and make it easier for hackers to find flaws.
Experts recommend far more layers of cyberprotection than manufacturers have thought necessary. Because many of the devices will often be practically inaccessible, the “patch and pray” strategy used for many desktop software packages is unlikely to be an effective strategy for many forms of IoT devices. Right now, there are hundreds of companies churning out “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices as fast as they can, without thinking too much on the security issues they can cause in the future. The imperative is clear: Do your homework on the specific security features of any IoT device you might consider bringing into the home. What steps are IoT companies taking to keep us safe from others online, and what constitutes a truly “safe” smart appliance?
What we’re opening up is a whole new subject not just of security but of safety. That safety depends on devices to be constantly connected to the Internet the same way they’re connected to the power grid. That’s a whole new area that deserves its own consideration. Keep in mind that IoT is one field where cyber security flaws can kill in the worst case. Connecting unrelated devices in the IoT means many more pieces now affect reliability and security. More devices are now considered critical, such as a connected baby monitor or a smart smoke detector, because wrong information can injure or kill people. The Internet of Things is coming no matter what happens. The people in charge of keeping the public safe and the industry healthy need to be ready.
The European Police Office (Europol) said governments are ill-equipped to counter the menace of “injury and possible deaths” spurred by hacking attacks on critical safety equipment. There are many potential dangers are in transportation: many new cars are Internet connected and potentially vulnerable, SCADA Systems in Railways Vulnerable to Attack and Airline bosses ignore cyber security concerns at their peril. With industrial control systems becoming network-connected, security risks rise and will need a long-term solution. In light of the trend toward the Industrial Internet of Things, development teams must start thinking hard about network security and planning for its long-term viability.
You have to accept the fact that at each point in the IoT there are vulnerabilities to malicious attacks and interception of vital information. Soon, almost every network will soon have some IoT-hacking in it. IDC predicts that in two years from 90 per cent of the global IT networks have met IoT data theft. In a report, cybersecurity firm Fortinet expects greater threats from “denial of service attacks on assembly line, factory, industrial control systems, and healthcare and building management…resulting in revenue losses and reputation damages for organizations globally.” This opens new doors of risks in the areas of corporate extortion, altering of corporate business operations, and the extension of cyberattacks to include physical threats of harm to civilians.
There are lessons to be learned to keep the cyber security in control in the IoT era. There will be lessons to be learned for all the parties of the IoT ecosystem. The companies that figure out how to make security available on multi-stakeholder platforms will be the most successful ones. Figuring out a secure platform is important, but having different levels of security is still important. Different uses have different bars. Security is a self-regulating system to some extent because it is supply and demand. That is the Holy Grail for technology right now, which is how to build systems with enough security—not 100% protection right now—from a unified platform point of view for multiple applications.
The data generated by the Internet of Things has the potential to reveal far more about users than any technology in history: These devices can make our lives much easier … The Internet of Things however, can also reveal intimate details about the doings and goings of their owners through the sensors they contain. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large. There is a lot of effort is going today at the government level. They’re not thinking about whether the Internet goes down. They’re worried about what happens if the Internet gets compromised.
When we have devices on the field, there is question how to analyze the data coming from them. This is easily a “big data” problem because of the huge amount of data that comes from very large number of sensors. Being able to monitor and use the data that comes from the Internet of Things is a huge potential challenge with different providers using different architectures and approaches, and different chip and equipment vendors teaming up in a range of different ways. Many large and smaller companies are active on the field: Intel, IBM, Lantronix+Google, Microchip+Amazon, Freescale+Oracle, Xively, Jasper, Keen.io, Eurotech, and many other.
The huge increase of data is coming. Radiant predicts that wireless sensor networks will be used to monitor and control very many domestic, urban, and industrial systems. This promises to produce an explosion of data, much of which will be discarded as users are overwhelmed by the volume. As a result, analysis of the data within the wireless sensor network will become necessary so that alerts and meaningful information are generated at the leaf nodes. This year has seen the software at the very highest point in the Internet of Things stack — analytics — becoming tightly coupled with the embedded devices at the edge of the network, leading to many different approaches and providers.
Integrating data from one IoT cloud to another will have it’s challenges. Automation services make big steps by cutting corners. Sites like IFTTT, Zapier, bip.io, CloudWork, and elastic.io allow users to connect applications with links that go beyond a simple synch. Check what is happening with integration and related services like IFTTT, ItDuzzit, Amazon Lambda. For example IFTTT is quietly becoming a smart home powerhouse.
Most important sources of information for this article:
With $16M In Funding, Helium Wants To Provide The Connective Tissue For The Internet Of Things
IFTTT, other automation services make big steps by cutting corners
Internet of Things: Engineering for Everyone
IoT in Protocol War, Says Startup – Zigbee fortunes dim in building control
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – Corralling the Internet of Things
What’s Holding Back The IoT – Device market opportunities will explode, but only after some fundamental changes
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – IoT, robots, 4K to dominate CES
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
Tech More: Mobile Internet of Things BI Intelligence Consumer Electronics – Most Massive Device Market
Wearables make hardware the new software
Zigbee Opens Umbrella 3.0 Spec
IoT Will Give ‘Embedded’ a Shot in the Arm - Connected cities to be largest IoT market
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Short-Range, Low-Power Sensors – once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters
The one problem the Internet of Things hasn’t solved
Plan Long Term for Industrial Internet Security
To Foil Cyberattacks, Connected Cars Need Overlapping Shields
IoT cybersecurity: is EDA ready to deliver?
More Things Are Critical Systems
Silicon, Security, and the Internet of Things
The missing piece of the smart home revolution
Hackers will soon be targeting your refrigerator
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
1,316 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoTgreen: battery-less IoT sensors of the future
https://hackaday.io/project/6243-iotgreen-battery-less-iot-sensors-of-the-future
This project creates a new platform for battery-less IoT enabled devices, to save resources, protect environment and reduce maintenance
This project focuses on finding new ways to wirelessly power Bluetooth and other wireless sensors/actuators just from harvested energy. According to MIT, the number of connected devices will reach almost 30 billion until 2020. 15 billion will be ‘Things’.
The IoTgreen pursues following goals:
- devices with virtually ‘infinite’ battery life
- to create an affordable platform for development of battery-free sensors and actuators
- reducing CO2 emissions created by using battery powered devices
- development of ultra-safe sensors for dangerous environments
- community based approach by providing open-source hardware designs and SDK free of charge
- advanced cloud analytics
The number of sensors will reach hundreds of billions in next years. One of the biggest challenges today is to find new ways of powering these.
Energy harvesting is one of the solutions for this problem.
The IoTgreen project wants to develop a new platform, performing both research on different methods – RF energy harvesting, solar harvesting and laser beam harvesting – but also a product-ready and developer-friendly open-source solutions.
All schematics, PCB layouts and source codes are under CC BY-SA license. Some parts of source codes for nRF51 MCU may be a property of Nordic Semiconductor ASA. This will be specified in the source code.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Salesforce Announces New Internet of Things Cloud, As Dreamforce Opens — When you think of Salesforce.com, you probably don’t think about the burgeoning Internet of Things, but Salesforce wants to help customers make sense of all of the data coming from the growing number of connected devices …
Salesforce Announces New Internet of Things Cloud, As Dreamforce Opens
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/15/salesforce-announces-new-internet-of-things-cloud-as-dreamforce-opens/
When you think of Salesforce.com, you probably don’t think about the burgeoning Internet of Things, but Salesforce wants to help customers make sense of all of the data coming from the growing number of connected devices — often referred to as the Internet of Things.
The company is announcing its brand new Salesforce Internet of Things Cloud at Dreamforce, its huge customer conference, which opens today in San Francisco. The new cloud is built on the all-new Thunder platform.
Regardless, it’s placing a big bet on the Internet of Things. It sees a connection between the customer and all of this data being generated by devices and various other sources and the company wants to help customers begin to capture and make sense of this growing amount of information.
“We are watching the increasing volume of data coming off of connected devices, and we are thinking about how we can help customers deal with those massive amounts of data,” Dylan Steele, senior director of product marketing for the App Cloud at Salesforce told TechCrunch.
But it’s not just device data, they want to capture with this new tool. It’s data coming from apps, social streams, web data, weather data — in short, anything that can help companies build a more complete picture of their customers.
The IoT Cloud also promises to ingest more elaborate data from the Industrial Internet of Things sending information from factories, warehouses, wind turbines, jet engines and similarly complex systems that have been equipped with sensors.
While this might seem the realm of others like GE Predix or perhaps Cloudera, Hortonworks or other software designed specifically to process big data, Salesforce believes it has a role here, particularly because the data is not locked into Salesforce. It can be exported an used in another tool, Steele explained — although how easy that will be remains to be seen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, Nokia, Ericsson square off against Chinese IoT threat
Proposed NB-LTE narrowband comms standard leaves Huawei on the outer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/15/intel_nokia_ericsson_square_off_against_chinese_iot_threat/
US and European vendors have linked arms in an effort to set low-bandwidth mobile communications standards.
Intel, Ericsson and Nokia have thrown their weight behind a standard proposal called Narrow-Band LTE (NB-LTE) to support the comms requirements of Internet of Things devices.
If adopted – there’s a vote on narrowband technologies slated for a 3GPP meeting next week, as Lightreading reports – NB-LTE would back the US-Euro vendors against the Huawei-led Narrowband Cellular IoT proposal.
It would also launch yet another Intel attempt to get a foothold in the mobile market, a segment that’s been a persistent disappointment for Chipzilla.
Intel says it’ll have a 2016 roadmap for NB-LTE products aimed at power-efficient, slim form factor products. Ericsson and Nokia will concentrate on developing the infrastructure side of NB-LTE, hopefully with a minimum of disruption to networks that operators have already deployed.
In this white paper (PDF), Nokia puts its position that NB-LTE’s 200 kHz channel is optimised for machine-to-machine communications, and can be implemented as a software upgrade to existing base stations.
NB-LTE’s proponents are targeting the 700-900 MHz spectrum and want their devices to have a battery life of more than ten years.
http://networks.nokia.com/sites/default/files/document/nokia_lte-m_-_optimizing_lte_for_the_internet_of_things_white_paper.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Strong ARM scoops up Sansa to boost IoT security
Chipmaker adds Israeli company’s bolt-on protection to its bulging armoured sack
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/30/arm_buys_iot_firm_sansa_security/
Chipmaker ARM has sealed a deal to buy Israeli Internet of Things (IoT) security specialist Sansa Security. Financial terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not officially disclosed. However, the WSJ previously reported that around $75m-$85m was on the table.
ARM makes the chips that power the majority of the world’s smartphones. The Sansa acquisition will allow it to add hardware and software-based security features, boosting protection for sensitive data and content on any connected device.
Sansa’s technology is already deployed across a range of smart connected devices and enterprise systems. The company was previously known as Discretix, prior to rebranding last October, and specialised in embedded security technologies.
The deal complements the ARM security portfolio, including ARM TrustZone technology and SecurCore processor IP.
“Any connected device could be a target for a malicious attack, so we must embed security at every potential attack point,” said Mike Muller, CTO of ARM in a statement. “Protection against hackers works best when it is multi-layered, so we are extending our security technology capability into hardware subsystems and trusted software. This means our partners will be able to license a comprehensive security suite from a single source.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT security is RUBBISH says IoT vendor collective
Online Trust Alliance calls on gadget vendors to stop acting like clowns
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/iot_security_is_rubbish_says_iot_vendor_collective/
A vendor group whose membership includes Microsoft, Symantec, Verisign, ADT and TRUSTe reckons the Internet of Things (IoT) market is being pushed with no regard to either security or consumer privacy.
In what will probably be ignored by the next startup hoping to get absorbed into Google’s Alphabet’s Nest business, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) is seeking comment on a privacy and trust framework for the Internet of Things.
Stunt-hacks and bad implementations have demonstrated that IoT security is currently pretty hopeless. The OTA says that won’t change if manufacturers and services keep pumping out gewgaws and gadgets without caring about risks.
Announcing the framework, the OTA warns against letting the Internet of Things market repeat history and ignore the product lifecycle in their security considerations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s consumer IoT vision – stupid, desperate, creepy
So, just like everyone else’s, in fact
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/03/samsung_iot_vision_sad_weird_creepy/
IFA Sketch While the business side of the Internet of Things looks in good nick, and isn’t actually anything new, the consumer prospects look remote. Samsung is one of the few global companies that’s able to project a vision of consumer IoT: it does technology as well as consumer electronics and white goods.
And it tried to give us a “vision thing” at IFA in Berlin. The next big thing?
But, sadly, no. Samsung promised that consumer IoT would lead to “smarter cities, smarter nations and ultimately a smarter world”. But its use cases for “connected everything” are just as contrived as everyone else’s.
They either infantilise the user – which is the opposite of smarter – or are just plain weird.
Samsung demonstrated how a father could spy on his student daughter, with notifications updating him on his phone and car dashboard where she was. And he could also keep tabs on his wife, as a notification popped up telling him she’d arrived home.
In another example, a Samsung exec told us how if you fell asleep on the sofa watching TV late at night, Samsung’s IoT home would eventually put all the lights on and brew you coffee – “so you’re fresh to go.”
Wait, what? It assumes you want to stay dozing in yesterday’s clothes all night?
Others were pointless: like an audio system for shouting at the kids to tell them when their dinner’s ready. Or the inevitable “knows when you’re near home and puts on the microwave”. Every idea for connected consumer IT seems to have come from the same brainstorming session years ago – what a crazy offsite that must have been.
We’ve heard these a million times. Some of them are even on the market, and they don’t exactly sell like hot cakes.
A couple of significant developments in consumer IoT recently are a growing awareness of the vulnerabilities and general ridicule. Both are health developments – but neither was acknowledged here. Security barely got a mention (while the word “open” got a dozen) and the scenarios almost seem designed to invite ridicule.
I thought it interesting that “save the planet” isn’t a sales pitch any more
This isn’t to say that the logic behind adding secure internet connections to business supply chains, and M2M communications, is unsound. It’s a continuous part of business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
Google OnHub teardown shows large speaker, huge heatsink, lots of antennas, and a light sensor that doesn’t yet work
Google OnHub gets torn asunder, reveals big speaker, many antennas
Google’s OnHub router is packed with hardware that doesn’t work yet.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/google-onhub-gets-torn-asunder-reveals-big-speaker-many-antennas/
Even after our review of Google’s OnHub router, the device is still a mystery. Today Google is selling a $200 Wi-Fi router with an abundance of processing power that promises to some day be a smart home device. We’re guessing it will power the “Google On” smart home ecosystem, but Google isn’t talking about any details today.
Perhaps the mad scientists over at iFixit can shed some light on the device. They recently ripped open the Google OnHub, displaying its internals for all the world to see. They found lots and lots of antennas, a huge heatsink, and it was mostly held together with clips.
The big surprise is the sizable speaker that sits at the top of the device. During setup, the speaker emits a loud ringtone-like sound that pairs the OnHub with a phone, but the OnHub speaker is much larger than what you would find in a smartphone. It’s still a far cry from Amazon’s woofer/tweeter combo in the Echo, though.
There’s also a Silicon Labs EM3581 SOC network co-processor for ZigBee and Skyworks 66109 2.4 GHz ZigBee/Smart Energy front-end module, which are also dormant. Both will be used, not for Zigbee compatible devices, but for Google’s “Thread” protocol.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hamza Shaban / BuzzFeed:
Obama Pledges $160 Million To Fund “Smart City” Initiatives
Obama Pledges $160 Million To Fund “Smart City” Initiatives
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hamzashaban/obama-pledges-160-million-to-fund-smart-city-initiatives#.ojAGAQrP5
From networked-vehicle pilot programs in New York City to a reclamation project in Detroit, the Obama administration hopes to spur massive development in smart city projects.
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. And in developed countries, the (relatively) lower cost and increasing ubiquity of technology such as smartphones and sensors, combined with big data, means city governments now have new and novel ways to harness computing power to tackle crime, traffic congestion, energy use, and housing — if, that is, they can afford them.
To that end, the Obama administration announced on Monday a $160 million investment in “smart city” research that includes dozens of tech collaborations with municipalities and industry leaders. According to John Holdren, the senior science adviser to the president and director of the Office of Science and Technology, the initiative will help “transform energy and resource use in our cities, and improve the quality of life for our cities’ inhabitants.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
White House Spending $160M On ‘Smart Cities,’ IoT
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327698&
The White House wants cities to be able to communicate better, so it has a plan. It involves some money, software development, and a little bit of emphasis on the buzzworthy Internet of Things trend.
On Monday, Sept. 14, the Obama administration announced what it’s calling the Smart Cities Initiative, which means $160 million in federal grants to create software and IoT applications that can help collect data and information in order for communities to deliver better services to citizens.
Or, as the White House puts it, the “‘Smart Cities Initiative’ [...] will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services.”
White House Spending $160M On ‘Smart Cities,’ IoT
http://www.informationweek.com/government/leadership/white-house-spending-$160m-on-smart-cities-iot/a/d-id/1322186?
A new program from the Obama White House is looking to spend $160 million on so-called Smart Cities to improve communication and quality-of-life through technology and the Internet of Things.
The White House wants cities to be able to communicate better, so it has a plan. It involves some money, software development, and a little bit of emphasis on the buzzworthy Internet of Things trend.
The grants have the stated purpose “to develop and scale next-generation Internet application prototypes that leverage gigabit speeds to achieve transformative impact in areas ranging from health care to public safety.”
There will also be $3 million for the University of Chicago to support the creation of the Array of Things (AoT) in Chicago.
AoT will be the first network to “serve as an infrastructure for researchers to rapidly deploy sensors, embedded systems, computing, and communications systems at scale in an urban environment. Comprised of 500 nodes deployed throughout the city of Chicago, each with power, Internet, and a base set of sensing and embedded information systems capabilities, the Array of Things will continuously measure the physical environment of urban areas at the city block scale and unlock promising new research trajectories.”
It’s IoT on growth enhancers, and a place to plug in all the data that the sensors the IoT will generate.
AT&T is announcing that it will support IoT and smart cities technology adoption by supporting test beds in US cities, as well as others around the world. The focus will be on “smart metering, lighting, traffic management, parking, and public safety.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Raspberry Pi Projects For Learning IoT
http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/10-raspberry-pi-projects-for-learning-iot/d/d-id/1320757
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a great platform for building Internet of Things project: It’s a super platform for learning about the IoT. Here are ten projects to help built IoT skills.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Philips’ Home Medicine Connects to Medical Records
Monitors patients remotely via sensors
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327695&
By monitoring home medical sensors and correlating them with your medical records and that of other people with similar maladies, Royal Philips (The Netherlands) hopes to create more effective treatment plans while patients remain in the comfort of their own home. Philips top-to-bottom (home-to-archive) medical technology solution will be announced today at Dreamforce 2015 (Sept. 15-18, San Francisco).
Philips envisions their stay-at-home medical treatment technology—using Bluetooth to connect to smartphones which connect to WiFi which connect to doctor’s offices and automated medical archives—to eventually expand to cover all common maladies capable of being home-managed. To get started, however, it has constructed its HeathSuite Digital Platform to begin by treating diabetes patients.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rebooting IT Revolution Essential to American Tech Leadership
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327694&
The IoT’s potential is an ocean of enormous depth, and to harness this and other promising technologies, we must invest ambitiously in research – and we must make the investment now.
Over the last half-century, the semiconductor industry has helped bring about the greatest period of technological advancement in the history of human kind. Driven by the ingenuity of industry workers and accelerated by public-private research investments, semiconductors have given rise to new industries, technologies, and applications that were the stuff of science fiction only a few short years ago.
But those accomplishments are in the past, and our industry’s greatest virtue is its relentless focus on the future, the next great innovations, the next great opportunities. One example, still in its infancy, is the Internet of Things (IoT), a burgeoning network of connected devices that communicate with each other. The IoT holds great potential for applications across a range of fields, from transportation to personalized medicine to “insight” technologies that collect and analyze data to help us gain a greater understanding of the world around us. Underlying all these exciting new technologies are, of course, semiconductors.
The IoT’s potential is an ocean of enormous depth, and to harness this and other promising technologies, we must invest ambitiously in research – and we must make the investment now.
A coalition of leaders from the tech industry and academia, led by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), this month released a report highlighting the urgent need for robust investments in research to advance IoT and develop other cutting-edge innovations that will sustain and strengthen America’s global technology leadership.
The United States stands at a crossroads in the global race to uncover the next transformative innovations that will determine technology leadership. We either aggressively invest in research to foster new, semiconductor-driven technologies such as the IoT that will shape the future of the digital economy, or we risk ceding ground to competitors abroad.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: A Full-Stack IoT Platform
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/15/hackaday-prize-semifinalist-a-full-stack-iot-platform/
There are millions of devices and sensors connected to the Internet, and the next decade will bring billions more. How will anyone keep track of all these sensors? With analog.io, a platform for IoT devices, and [Luke]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize.
The problem of aggregating data from an Internet of things has been tackled before. Last year, Sparkfun released data.sparkfun.com, built on Phant, a tool for collecting data from the Internet of Things. Even though Phant can collect the data, it only does this in neat columns with values and time stamps. To turn this into something a little more visual, analog.io was born. In the future, [Luke] will add support for thingspeak and Xively data streams; the entire project is intended to be backend agnostic, allowing anyone to get their data from any thing, store it on any server, and connect it to analog.io for visualization and sharing.
analog.io – A full stack IoT platform
A full stack project dedicated to easily collecting, analyzing and sharing IoT sensor data.
https://hackaday.io/project/4648-analogio-a-full-stack-iot-platform
analog.io is a full stack IoT web service and hardware platforms where people can create connected devices and share them with the world. It is designed to solve all kinds of world problems from air pollution, improving farm output or studying the bee population. It is really only limited by the users imagination.
From a software perspective, analog.io is a graphing front end that is backend agnostic. What this means is that users have the freedom to host their own data locally, within the analog.io cloud, or choice of 3rd party services such as data.sparkfun.com. At the moment only phant.io servers are supported but it is entirely possible and on the roadmap to support services such as thingspeak as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
M2M is a Player; the Internet of Things is the Team
http://intelligentsystemssource.com/m2m-is-a-player-the-internet-of-things-is-the-team/?utm_source=Pubpress&utm_medium=email&utm_term=M2M+is+a+Player;+the+Internet+of+Things+is+the+Team&utm_content=September+eNewsletter+-+HW/SW+Platform+Simplifies+…&utm_campaign=ISS+eNewsletter+September+-+HW/SW+Platform+Simplifies+and+Accelerates+IoT+Product+Development
Machine-to-machine systems were a start. Different dedicated devices cooperating for an application could share data and interact for a common purpose. Now with the emergence of the Internet of Things, such collaboration has become easier and the access to data and analysis has grown much richer.
When the IoT first became a buzzword, there was much talk of it being machine-to-machine (M2M) 2.0. But there is an enormous expansion of application scope and anticipated benefits when moving from M2M to the IoT. While it can be argued that the IoT is simply the next evolution of M2M, does it make sense to attribute the promised business benefits of big data and its manipulation to a term as limited as machine-to-machine? M2M is simply that: the transference of data from one machine to another. And while there was always an implied usage benefit, the original definition of M2M limits the term to a subset of the Internet of Things.
The origin of the term M2M is in telecommunications. M2M is network focused; traditional M2M solutions typically rely on point-to-point communication using embedded hardware modules and either cellular, satellite or wired, public networks.
What the IoT can provide, with M2M as a key enabler, is big data.
Cloud connectivity takes today’s intelligent middleware a step further than previous generations of remote management technology. By employing a Cloud server architecture and an M2M stack on top of the intelligent middleware, embedded devices can connect to the Cloud without additional design requirements (Figure 1). For example, the M2M stack pushes system data to the user’s Cloud server via any kind of TCP/IP connection. System managers have easy access to data and analytics through any commercial Cloud portal, using any device (e.g., PC, tablet, smart phone).
When systems are available, operators can observe their performance. Cloud-based remote management furthers that process by enabling observation anytime, anywhere. Embedded management agents may be used to continuously upload data through an encrypted Transport Layer Security (TLS, the successor protocol of Secure Sockets Layer or SSL) connection.
Machine-to-X Communication
With the IoT, communication has broadened from M2M to become machine-to-human or machine-to-Cloud. A critical challenge to deploying industrial IoT solutions is the lack of a single standard of network connection. For example, brownfield devices use a scattered variety of proprietary protocols; using an IoT gateway that supports cross-communication protocols and can connect with IP-based networks can greatly simplify an IoT deployment.
Intel has invested much time and effort in an Intel IoT Gateway platform that addresses the need for incorporating both legacy devices and newer, more open systems into IoT deployments.
Wind River IDP XT provides a software stack for communicating with local equipment and the Cloud. Its extensive connectivity choices include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and short-range wireless protocols widely used in smart buildings. Wind River IDP XT supports the MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for data transportation, and remote management protocols such as Technical Report 069 (TR-069), CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) and Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA DM). For developers, the Wind River IDP XT software stack provides Lua, Java, and OSGi application environments to enable rapid, reusable application development.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New IEEE ComSoc training investigates wireless Internet of Things
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2015/09/ieeecomsoc-iot-training.html?cmpid=EnlCIMSeptember142015&eid=289644432&bid=1174945
“Most new Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications have a wireless component,” notes IEEE Comsoc in the course’s description. “Generally, the wireless technology is an enabler, but not the main focus of the company developing the application / product. Such companies may struggle with the main issues associated with selecting and integrating wirelesss technology into products. This course teaches you what you need to know in order to select a wireless solution for an IoT application.”
According to IEEE Comsoc, the course outline covers the following areas:
– IoT basics
– Wireless behavior (Line of Sight, Near Line of Sight, Non Line of Sight)
– RF and antenna (Performance characteristics, frequency bands of interest and global variants, band selection criteria)
– Radio specifications (What is being measured, how to compare specifications, typical performance numbers)
– Licensed vs. Unlicensed spectrum
– The main wireless standards (Cellular, WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth)
– Other wireless standards
– Networking standards (Cellular, Ad-hoc, Mesh, 6LowPan)
– Making your product legal
– Getting good performance mumbers
Tomi Engdahl says:
MCU dev kit secures your connection to the cloud
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4440336/MCU-dev-kit-secures-your-connection-to-the-cloud?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150915&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150915&elq=60cd222427ad49218e4daa7bac9714fc&elqCampaignId=24766&elqaid=28096&elqat=1&elqTrackId=968d0b7f98cc479fb52f2d668f177979
Although the TV series “Mr. Robot” is a work of fiction, it does an excellent job of showing how a poorly-secured smart thermostat, lighting controller, or other seemingly-harmless networked device can serve as a beachhead for a malicious cyber-attack. Until recently however, hardening IoT-enabled products was a relatively complex task, requiring the integration of several devices and several different pieces of firmware. To simplify this task, Texas Instruments has introduced the TM4C Crypto Connected LaunchPad development kit.
Don’t mistake this kit for a stand-alone security board – it’s a powerful embedded system which also happens to be equipped with an arsenal of cyber-security capabilities. The low-cost TM4C Crypto Connected LaunchPad development kit is equipped with a TI TM4C129ENCPDT microcontroller which boasts a 120-MHz ARM Cortex-M4F core (with floating point) and a compliment of hardware security accelerators. The MCU’s hardware security functions include Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES), Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) accelerators. It also includes a library of security functions from WolfSSL which utilizes these crypto hardware accelerators to allow a secure SSL/TLS connection with the cloud server.
Tomi Engdahl says:
If the giants of IT industry market men asked if the internet is expanding everywhere.
Most recently, manufacturing chips Intel has demonnut how the company manufactured by the nail-sized computer can be used even if the bra.
Intel has introduced self-Curie-chip carrier, inter alia, trick wheels connected. Motion sensors equipped with a 32-bit chip is 384 kilobytes of storage space and 80 kilobytes sram memory. In connection with other devices chip bluetooth.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/intel-ui-liiveihin-automaattisesti-tuulettuvat-rintaliivit-esitelty-3483320
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM launches dedicated IoT division as it expands support for connected cars
It’s enough to drive you sensorless
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2426018/ibm-launches-dedicated-iot-division-as-it-expands-support-for-connected-cars
IBM HAS ANNOUNCED the launch of two dedicated business units for education and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Overseen by Harriet Green, formerly of Thomas Cook, as VP, the two units will be responsible for developing these and other “new growth” businesses, the company said.
IBM confirmed in March that it would pump $3bm over four years into cognitive computing, cloud data and developer tools for IoT integration, all with a focus on enhancing specific industries.
The team will consist of 2,000 consultants, researchers and developers.
“Harriet brings to IBM a strong, proven track record as a transformative leader,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research at IBM.
In a separate announcement, IBM has launched a new cloud service which the company hopes will integrate actionable insights to identify potential maintenance issues before there’s a fault, as well as real-time diagnostics and intelligent navigation.
The news comes as part of IBM’s new IoT Foundation created with chipmaker ARM, and is based around the idea of gathering data from sensors all over a car and combining it in the cloud with maintenance, weather, traffic and a knowledge base to make driving a more fluid experience.
“With the significant increase in connected cars, automotive manufacturers have the ability to take near-real time data and put it to good use for drivers in a variety of ways, from finding the nearest parking space and most efficient route, to maintenance alerts that help drivers expect the unexpected,” said Dirk Wollschlaeger, general manager, global automotive industry at IBM.
“By combining data directly from the car with other sources, the insights derived through the IBM IoT for Automotive solution have the potential to change how we interact with our vehicles.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
11 IoT Programming Languages Worth Knowing
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-applications/11-iot-programming-languages-worth-knowing/d/d-id/1319375?itc=edit_in_body_cross
Choosing which language to use for an Internet of Things project can be as big a decision as choosing a hardware platform. Here are 11 options to consider for your next coding project.
Internet of Things (IoT) development projects are springing up at businesses all over the world. New hardware platforms make embedded systems in IoT applications easier to engineer than ever before. Once you’ve chosen the hardware platform, though, you still must develop the application software, and that’s where more (and often, more difficult) decisions must be made.
Not so very long ago, your choice of programming language was pretty much dictated by your choice of hardware platform. More modern platforms that are based on open source standards and able to support multiple languages make for much more flexibility and, therefore, more choices. That’s where we come in.
There are 11 languages that float to the top of the consideration pool when it comes to programming embedded systems. They range from general-purpose languages like C++ and Java to embedded-specific choices like Go and Parasail. Each offers advantages and disadvantages.
C
C is as close to a lingua franca as exists in the world of software development: It’s available on nearly every advanced embedded system platform that exists. For some platforms where it’s not directly available, it’s still the basis for the dedicated language used in the SDK.
C++
C++ kept the spare nature of C but added data abstraction, classes, and objects. All of these features make C++ a popular choice for those who are writing embedded and IoT code for Linux systems.
Java
Java was written to be an object-oriented language that is incredibly portable: There are very, very few hardware dependencies built into the compiler. In order to get the specific, fine control over particular pieces of hardware, Java depends on hardware-support libraries that are called from the generic code.
All of this makes Java great from an economic standpoint: An investment in Java code can be paid back across many different platforms.
JavaScript
JavaScript is, as the name implies, a scripting language that is heavily used for building Web-fronted applications. If you wanted to use the Apache server on a Raspberry Pi to gather data from a network of Arduino-based sensors, for example, JavaScript would be a good starting point for the effort.
From its beginnings at Netscape, JavaScript has grown to be a very full-featured language. It’s not something you can count on for lightweight embedded controllers, though — its interpreted structure means that there’s an overhead price to be paid. It’s a price that requires at least a RasPi-scale system to pay the bill.
Python
Python has become one of the “go-to” languages in Web development, and its use has spread to the embedded control and IoT world. Python is very flexible in many ways.
The thing that makes Python good for programming teams, though, is its emphasis on readability.
Python’s possibility as an embedded language rests on having sufficient power in the embedded platform.
Go
Go was developed at Google and is available on a wide variety of processors and platforms. While it is one of the many languages that owes a debt to C, there are a number of ways in which it’s superior to C for certain types of embedded programming.
Go adds an explicit hash table type, as well as types that can be very useful for gathering data from and sending data to separate sensors and actuators. The ability to use a network of sensors and devices is further supported by a key Go facility — though it introduces a risk.
Go supports concurrent input, output, and processing on many different channels.
Rust
Rust shares many of Go’s qualities, though it does solve one major problem of Go.
Rust includes functions that eliminate race conditions, making it a less-risky language than Go for highly concurrent programs.
you should look at Rust and Go side by side to see which is the better candidate for your purpose.
Parasail
Parasail is a language that you’ll consider if you have a requirement for parallel processing in your IoT application.
Parasail is a compiled, object-oriented language that has evolved so that it can be programmed with syntax that looks like Java, Python, C#, or even (Heaven help us all) Ada.
B#
Where many of the languages mentioned here are large system languages that have been scaled down to fit into an embedded platform, B# was designed from the ground-up as a very small, very efficient embedded control language. The embedded virtual machine (EVM) that allows B# to run on a variety of different platforms only takes 24k of memory
Assembler
When you want to go truly old-school, or you need to keep your project as compact as possible, then assembler is the path you’ll take.
For hardcore programmers and the final, optimized version of shipping products, assembler can get you into small spaces that just won’t hold any other environment.
Forth
Forth is another language designed and optimized for embedded system programming. While it’s used primarily for system-level programming, there’s one aspect of Forth that must be addressed: It’s very much like a religion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud Options for Industrial IoT and Smart Cities
http://www.eeweb.com/news/cloud-options-for-industrial-iot-and-smart-cities
Libelium announced new Cloud integration options from software partners specialized in automotive systems, business process management, civil engineering, industrial applications, supervisory control and data systems (SCADA), and Smart Cities solutions, in the latest build-out of its wireless sensor network ecosystem.
Libelium’s new Cloud partners include software providers from Asia, North America, and Spain, reaching markets all over the world. Based on the Meshlium wireless gateway, Libelium’s Cloud connector framework allows easy configuration of Cloud platforms without the need of programming or further integration to reduce time-to-market for IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. Existing Meshlium customers can access this new group of Cloud platforms by upgrading their Meshlium software.
“IoT project integration should be as flexible and easy as possible to nurture new development and incorporate legacy systems, and that is why we are giving customers access to such a wide selection of Cloud software solutions,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM mbed Developer Site
ARM mbed simplifies and speeds up the creation and deployment of devices based on ARM microcontrollers.
https://developer.mbed.org/
mbed
http://www.mbed.com/en/
The ARM® mbed™ IoT Device Platform provides the operating system, cloud services, tools and developer ecosystem to make the creation and deployment of commercial, standards-based IoT solutions possible at scale.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What it takes to secure an SoC
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-iot-/4440308/What-it-takes-to-secure-an-SoC-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150916&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150916&elq=f9401654c58b44c68da10dc9b5d9eb4b&elqCampaignId=24774&elqaid=28104&elqat=1&elqTrackId=1bb2c393b6794662ac9ce748bc8e1e52
In the era of Internet-of-Things (IoT), security has become one of the most vital parts of a System-on-Chip (SoC). Secured SoCs are used to provide authentication, confidentiality, integrity, non-reproduction, and access control to the system (hardware and software). Here are some of the multiple architectural techniques to develop a secure system.
Typically in a secured SoC, four key functionalities are desired: secure booting, secured memory, run time data integrity check, and a central security breach response.
Secure Booting
Boot is an important and vulnerable part of an SoC from a security point of view. If a hacker is able to control the booting process of the SoC, then all other security implementations can be bypassed to gain unauthorized access. SoC architects develop multiple techniques to provide security during the boot process of SoC.
Secured Memory
The Memory in SoC can be secured to preserve sensitive data such as cryptographic keys, unique IDs, passwords, and the like.
The memory can be divided into multiple partitions, each with a different set of access controls.
Run-Time Data Integrity Check
A run-time data integrity check is used to ensure the integrity of the peripheral memory contents during run time execution. The secure booting sequence generates a reference file that contains the hash value of the contents of individual memory blocks stored in a secured memory. In the run-time mode, the integrity checker reads the contents of a memory block, waits for a specified period of time, and then reads the contents of another memory block. In the process, the checker also computes the hash values of the memory blocks and compares them with the contents of the reference file generated during boot time.
In case of a mismatch between two hash-values, the checker reports a security intrusion to a central unit that decides the action to be taken based on the security policy.
Central Security Breach Response Unit
This hardware module can be viewed as the SoC’s central reporting unit for security-related events such as software intrusions, voltage tampering, and the like. This security related event information allows the Security Breach Response Unit to determine the next state of the SoC.
Conclusion
SoC Security is paramount for the safe and reliable operation of IoT connected devices. The same capability that enables the SoC to perform their tasks must also enable them to recognize and handle threats. Fortunately, this does not require a revolutionary approach, but rather an evolution of the existing architecture.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT in Healthcare: Facing the Biggest Hurdles
http://www.techonline.com/electrical-engineers/education-training/tech-papers/4440181/IoT-in-Healthcare—Facing-the-Biggest-Hurdles?_mc=NL_TOL_EDT_TOL_featuredtechpapers_20150902&cid=NL_TOL_EDT_TOL_featuredtechpapers_20150902
As the medical industry evolves with more sophisticated and advanced techniques to cater to the human life span and ailments associated with it, concepts like IoT are having a profound impact on its comprehensive evolution. However, with the deepening impact of IoT coming forth, daunting challenges arise in implementing and integrating it with the core medical ecosystem. Medicine and healthcare is a big scattered puzzle and IoT finds effective usage in each block of the larger puzzle. The challenge is to bring each piece together in a functionally constructive form. This white paper talks about all such challenges in greater detail and suggestive ways in which these challenges can be dissolved by the IoT tech community at large.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Espotel founded industrial internet unit
Embedded systems supplier Espotel has set up at the beginning of September, focusing on the industrial to the internet a new business unit.
Business Unit, has been appointed Espotel Chief Technology Officer Jaakko Ala-Paavola.
Espotel to inform supplying services in the design of the entire supply chain of industrial internet. The company has expertise in the design of intelligent equipment, and collect information from sensors to always be in the cloud data for further processing.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/espotel-perusti-teollisen-internetin-yksikon-3483530
Tomi Engdahl says:
New challengers entering IoT connectivity market
http://embeddedexperience.blogspot.fi/2015/09/new-challengers-entering-iot.html
IoT connectivity market is far from mature. New challengers are popping up every now and then. The latest was announced Today, when Intel, Nokia and Ericsson released their co-op in a new mobile radio technology called Narrow-Band (NB) LTE-M for Low Power Wide Area IoT communication.
Like the name says, NB LTE-M is narrow-band version of the LTE-M. NB uses 200 kHz band where as the normal LTE-M consumes 1.4MHz. Both versions can co-exists without interfering each others. The purpose of the narrower band is to reduce end-device power consumption and cost. Intel says it will launch low-cost and low-power chips for IoT market using the new technology. What does that mean in numbers remains to be seen.
Technologies listed in the comparison above are all intended for public networks. LoRa is the only one which is available for private network applications also. That means you can set up a LoRa gateway of your own just like using WiFi. Sigfox is closed and propriterary technology, and use of licensed frequency bands means you got to be an operator to get the license in hand.
The greatest weakness of LoRa technology is the use of unlicensed frequency band. In Europe, the duty-cycle limitation is only 1%. That’s regulatory not technology limitation. It does not affect much the downlink or uplink of many IoT applications, but over-the-air firmware updates are very difficult, next to impossible.
LoRa is available as of Today. For LTE-M, first device and network manufacturers must introduce new products, then operators must upgrade their base stations. I don’t believe LTE-M is really in place next year. Once it’s there, the deployment of the technology will be fast for sure.
No convergence of IoT connectivity technologies is visible within the foreseeable future. There are different use cases for different types of radios. Main categories are short range radios (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), Low Power Wide Area (LoRa, UNB), and cellular data. They have all different nature and no single technology will rule them all.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nathan Olivarez-Giles / Wall Street Journal:
iRobot’s WiFi-connected Roomba 980 maps your home via camera and can be controlled with an app, available in October for $900
iRobot’s Roomba 980 Maps Your Home Via Camera and Takes Smartphone Commands
http://blogs.wsj.com/personal-technology/2015/09/16/irobots-roomba-980-maps-your-home-via-camera-and-takes-smartphone-commands/
iRobot Corp. decided to straighten its Roomba robot vacuum out. In the past, Roombas puttered around, zigging and zagging randomly, bumping into things. iRobot swore by this iAdapt system, saying eventually it would clean the whole floor. But the Roomba 980, introduced Wednesday, walks the straight and narrow—with the help of a built-in camera and a whole new floor strategy.
There’s a reason iRobot is calling the Roomba 980 its smartest robo-vac yet. Not only does the camera that help it map it’s going and where it’s been, this is the first Roomba that connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi, allowing you to command it with a smartphone. Even if you’re not in the house.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dollars & Sense: Debating With the IoT Experts
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=31&doc_id=1327682&
The author of Sustaining Moore’s Law: Uncertainty Leading to a Certainty of IoT Revolution does a virtual macroeconomic makeover of some opinionated technology gurus pontifications.
Dollars & Sense: Debating With the IoT Experts
http://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=3315&doc_id=278638&image_number=1
In a guest blog for the Wall Street Journal on the future of Internet, Fadell said:
It took the telephone more than 45 years to earn a place in the majority of American homes. The Internet did it almost three times as fast. And yet, 4.4 billion people worldwide are still offline. Instead of seeking it out, we’ll be surrounded by Internet in future. And instead of extracting data from it, we’ll be fed a constant stream of curated, personalized information to help us solve problems and live better—and live better together.
The only free market approach to get more people online is to create an eco-system where the buying power of people grows in proportion to their productivity. While IoT would be able to feed abundant date to the end consumer, it wouldn’t make any business sense if that information is provided for free. To make the business of big data sustainable, not only should there be an incentive for the providers to charge the consumer by means of providing more and more data but at the same time, consumers should also have a good buying power to be able to afford pay for the personalized information. This needs a true free market ecosystem as well.
In a blog for the Huffington Post, Afshar writes:
All existing businesses must rethink their business models. Business models are shifting from discrete product sales, to recurring revenue models. Individual products no longer exist in a vacuum; interactions among devices from multiple sources and vendors must be understood and taken into account.
In an interview with the Inc. Magazine, Kawasaki said “I want precise location outside of Bluetooth range. In a nutshell, I want Life360 for anything I stick a tracker on. It’s not a matter of if, but when.”
n an IBM blog, O’Connor explained:
Any company wanting to transform using IoT data needs to fully embrace the cloud. And because most enterprises have already fully embraced the cloud, the next step, and the new killer application for the cloud, is the Internet of Things. The only way to ensure that the IoT is an enabler rather than an obstacle is to engineer new products, operate existing products and gather data from connected interaction with a holistic IoT strategy in mind.
For IoT to truly prosper, IoT apps need to take into consideration the local economy, customs, and traditions and need to be able to comply with and enforce laws on local level. This is how IoT revolution could lead to local economic development around the world and would be able to connect nearly 50 billion devices worldwide in a sustainable way by year 2020.
To say ‘Internet of Things’ is obligatory, but in the context of advertising it’s very important.
A highly personalized commerce alongwith mobile notifications and promotions is only possible with an ecosystem where the businesses make their decisions based on local information in order to cater to local economic needs. This calls for a wholesome decentralization of an economy while designing the IoT supply chains
Black (pictured at the right) placed his bet that startups companies will change the face of IoT. He said:
Users are using the Internet to manage their lives. The complexities have come in because there are so many silos of data from a consumer point of view. No one is going to want to have 15 apps to control 15 appliances. I can guarantee that there will be startup companies that bring that together.
I would second Black in his view that start-ups have a big role to play in success of IoT Revolution. The innovations come from start-ups and these innovations needs to materialize for benefit of economy at large. To create a robust growth of small businesses, major macroeconomic reforms have to undertaken.
In an interview with Forbes, Scoble predicted what we can expect next with the wearable technology. He said:
We are close to a second wave where we are going to have sensors that more accurately watch your activity while watching what is going on in the web stream. That is really where developers are going to get lit up.
the IoT ecosystem should focus not only on the supply side of the economics but also on the demand side of the same to ensure that the resulting IoT revolution leads to a sustainable ecosystem
In an interview given to the Inc. Magazine, Silva shares what captures his imagination in the Internet of Things space:
Technology surrounding us with useful information, like a kind of ‘engineered serendipity’. I’d like my smartphone to hear me when I say I’m hungry and recommend me a restaurant. I’d like to be serendipitously informed when a friend is nearby.
Papworth shared her views in Pew Research Center’s report about IoT. She expressed how IoT will bring the next revolution in digital technology:
Every part of our life will be quantifiable, and eternal, and we will answer to the community for our decisions.
Laurel points to a very important role that would be played by IoT in ensuring fairness of the system. However, in order to make it practical, the global economy needs to transform from present individualized capitalism to a more collaborative capitalism where majority are the stakeholders towards the success of the ecosystem rather than a few minority.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chips Slump as Drivers Falter
Internet of Things won’t revive industry
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327703&
Market researchers at Gartner are weeks away from lowering their forecasts for semiconductor growth in 2015 for the second time this year, this time to as little as 0.5%.
“This industry going forward is in a slower-growth mode because the big three drivers are slowing down so we expect 4-7% growth for the next several years — no double-digit growth,” said Jim Walker, a semiconductor analyst at Gartner, speaking at a lunch hosted by an industry trade group.
The sluggish numbers have people instinctively pointing to the Internet of Things as the next big driver. But that’s an assumption market watchers think is unrealistic. For example, even though wearables are growing at a 25% rate they will only represent 1% of the semiconductor market in 2019 because they use only a few chips and very inexpensive ones at that.
“It’s not the new big killer app some people think it is…the [semiconductor] driver has yet to be determined, but it’s not the IoT,” Walker said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
White House Spending $160M On ‘Smart Cities,’ IoT
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327698&
The White House wants cities to be able to communicate better, so it has a plan. It involves some money, software development, and a little bit of emphasis on the buzzworthy Internet of Things trend.
On Monday, Sept. 14, the Obama administration announced what it’s calling the Smart Cities Initiative, which means $160 million in federal grants to create software and IoT applications that can help collect data and information in order for communities to deliver better services to citizens.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Energy Harvesting Technology for designers in a practical Cherry evaluation kit
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4440341/Energy-Harvesting-Technology-for-designers-in-a-practical-Cherry-evaluation-kit?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20150917&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20150917&&elq=624691fbe53644e58839bdddf11d1bc7&elqCampaignId=24821&elqaid=28164&elqat=1&elqTrackId=ccfaf9c090d24ef59686ca788332df3a
Most of my audience tells me that they expect Energy Harvesting to begin in earnest in 3 to 5 years. Designers will need some good tools in order to familiarize themselves with different aspects of this growing technology concept.
Cherry Industrial Solutions, in my opinion, has a really nice kit available, their Evaluation Kit 2.0 which includes an energy harvesting generator, a rocker switch as well as snap-action switch in order for designers to perform some tests to learn some important aspects of this technology.
There is a receiver module for Energy Harvesting wireless switches. It operates in the frequency bands of Europe (868.3 MHz) as well as North America (915.0 MHz).
The rocker switch has a range of up to 300 m in an open area and 30 m inside buildings. Protocols are sent multiple times and delayed to assure robust data transmission.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fog Computing Happens when Big Data Analytics marries Internet Of Things
http://tarrysingh.com/2014/07/fog-computing-happens-when-big-data-analytics-marries-internet-of-things/
Hello Fog Computing, Goodbye Cloud Computing?
As Cloud Computing increasingly gets commoditized and as HyperCloud becomes mainstream, it might be time to reflect back on what the Cloud fixed for us. It gave us the following:
Adaptive subscription based model. You pay for what you use.
Homogeneous workloads could seamlessly and cost-efficiently be used on commodity hardware. (If you’re not on Amazon or Google Cloud, then you might want to check out why you’re paying so much)
Impacting performance with higher VM densities, awesome synergies in compute fabric
…and as a result of the above, a significantly reduced OPEX!
So it really is a blessing, right? Everything online and functioning at top speed. But wait! What about sensors and nodes that are increasingly penetrating into our homes, cars, grids via internet, the stuff we’re calling Internet Of Things? This is where Cisco introduced a foggy detail with its researchers calling for a different kind of platform called Fog Computing.
They claim that it is not going to cannibalise the Cloud but I really have to disagree on this one. Actually what they are doing is moving stuff within the cloud that requires the opposite of the benefits that I just described above. #IoT (Internet of Things) needs something else. Actually I – as a consumer don’t care and neither should you.
Most important is to note that Fog Computing will enable a totally new breed of applications and services that will come to life as hundreds of billion of things become part of our professional and personal lives. They claim that an interplay between Cloud and Fog is essential when it comes to data management and analytics.
Let’s understand what Fog Computing is first.
Fog Computing extends the Cloud Computing paradigm to the edge of the net- work. While Fog and Cloud use the same resources (networking, compute, and storage), and share many of the same mechanisms and attributes (virtualization, multi-tenancy) the extension is a non-trivial one in that there exist some fundamental differences that stem from the Fog raison d’etre.
Fog comes to life when…
Applications and services that require very low and predictable latency—the Cloud frees the user from many implementation details, including the precise knowledge of where the computation or storage takes place. This freedom from choice, welcome in many circumstances becomes a liability when latency is at premium (gaming, video conferencing). A very important point since latency is where the prohibitive cost constructs/wedges are, right?
Geo-distributed applications (pipeline monitoring, sensor networks to monitor the environment). This is , IMHO, the fourth dimension of Big Data besides Volume, Velocity and Variety. (My next IoT article will explain more what I mean by that)
Fast mobile applications (smart connected vehicle, connected rail).
Large-scale distributed control systems (smart grid, connected rail, smart traffic light systems).
Just THINK about opportunities!
- End-to-End Miles/Kilometer optimisation (first miles/km, high-ways/km, last miles/km) – Big Data & IoT Application
- Proactive Network Identification using Big Data/IoT
- Big Data Capacity Planning
- Supply Chain Risk Management with Big Data (Risk Reporting & Forecasting)
- Real-time CLV (Costumer Lifetime Value) Measurement, Monitoring & Reporting
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tiny Headless Servers Everywhere
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/17/tiny-headless-servers-everywhere/
Quick, what do “cloud compute engines” and goofy Raspberry Pi Internet of Things hacks have in common? Aside from all being parody-worthy buzzword-fests, they all involve administering remote headless (Linux) installations. It’s for exactly that reason that a new Ubuntu distribution flavor, Ubuntu (Snappy) Core, targets both the multi-bazillion-dollar Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the $55 BeagleBone Black.
If that combination seems unlikely to you, you’re not alone. But read on as we hope to make a little more sense of it all.
When rumors of the Raspberry Pi first hit the scene in 2011, it was marketed as the solution to the world’s computer literacy woes — at $25 per computer every child in the world could have one at their fingertips.
Nobody was thinking that we were in for an army of headless Linux servers, but that’s exactly what happened.
There were other small computers around; at the time, the BeagleBoard was the hotness on the single-board computer (SBC) front, but it was expensive enough that only the committed and nerdy were using them.
Then the Raspberry Pi came out at around a fourth of the price of the BeagleBoard, and something funny happened. Instead of being the solution to the world’s computer needs, the Raspberry Pi ended up working its way into the same project-space that the Arduino had inhabited. Maybe it was the price point and form factor.
For example, one can’t deny that a Twittering Toilet is a necessity of the modern era.
They’re cheap enough that you can dedicate one to the toilet without only minor pangs of guilt. So not long afterward, we have Raspberry Pis in toilets and chicken coops rather than in grade-school curricula.
These type of projects don’t use the device as a “computer” at all.
Or have a look at the Beagle family. The BeagleBoard (2010) was a full-fledged single-board computer (SBC); you could plug in a monitor and keyboard. Then came the bare-bones (and slightly less expensive) version: the BeagleBone (2012). Signalling that it was meant for embedded applications rather than being a standalone computer, it had no video output and was a bit cheaper. It was a success.
Even less expensive, the BeagleBone Black (2013) again picked up an HDMI port, because, heck, why not? And as if to answer that question, the newest BeagleBone Green replaces the video out with some I2C peripheral connectors,
A recent survey at Linux Gizmos asking their readership to rate their favorite single-board computers turned up no surprises on the popular-brand fronts: the Raspberry Pi is most popular, followed by the BeagleBone Black, followed by the Odroid offerings.
More interestingly, they also asked folks what applications they’re putting their SBCs toward. The results, in order:
home automation
special function servers
home multimedia
education
robotics / vehicles
data acquisition / control
HMI / industrial
“other”
kiosks
This matches our gut feeling about what the average Hackaday hacker is interested in as well, so we’ll buy it.
Running Headless: The Software Catches Up
So if the Internet of Things is going to be an internet of headless Linux boxes, isn’t it time our software / operating systems caught up? No more of this GUI configuration menu crap — that’s for desktops that have the luxury of monitors. What you need, once you’ve got your Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone sitting deep inside some box somewhere, is quick and easy deployment and network-based remote administration of the tiny headless Linux server that lies within. And until you’ve got its web server or VNC up and running, that means spending some quality time with the console.
Queue the parallel development in the “cloud” world. The need to quickly spin up machines on servers has put a premium on ease of installation and updating of complete systems using simple and powerful command-line tools. In particular, the ability to create a system, save the configuration and installation details, and then replay them back into another instance has become a lot easier in the last five years. See containers and Docker and all that jazz.
Conclusion
The unlikely marriage of software tech from “cloud appliances” with our hacked (non-metaphorical) appliances is just starting, and we think it’s actually going to benefit us hardware types.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Low power wide-area networking alternatives for the IoT
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4440343/Low-power-wide-area-networking-alternatives-for-the-IoT?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150917&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150917&elq=d5c6233c94124423ab76c90101c74d4b&elqCampaignId=24780&elqaid=28110&elqat=1&elqTrackId=7cf7bbce6dda4717b79d64836e27ed95
Wireless network technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth are fine for consumer applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), but many civic, industrial, and other IoT applications need to operate over vastly greater territory than these technologies can handle. Cellular and satellite machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies have traditionally filled the gap, but cost, power, and scalability concerns make these choices less appealing for the future. A number of low-power, wide-area networking (LP-WAN) alternatives have arisen that need careful consideration by developers looking to address these wide-ranging IoT applications.
The uses for wide-area IoT technology are legion. Civic infrastructure systems such as parking resources, traffic control, utilities monitoring and distribution control, and environmental monitoring are only a beginning. Agricultural uses such as monitoring of crop conditions and livestock movements need wide-area coverage. Asset monitoring and tracking, from taxicabs to refrigerated produce shipments need regional, national, or even worldwide coverage. Transportation infrastructures such as rail lines and roadways need wide-area monitoring. Even consumer applications such as health monitoring could benefit from having an alternative to cellphones for their wide-area connectivity.
LP-WAN Essentials
While the applications are diverse, they have many common attributes on their network wish lists
Low cost – Most wide-area IoT applications anticipate a need for many hundreds or thousands of end-node devices for each installation. In some cases
Low energy consumption – Few of the applications for wide-area IoT have the luxury of a local power generator. Most will depend on batteries and some may even need to use energy harvesting. For those with batteries, replacing depleted batteries can represent a major logistical challenge as well as a substantial cost. The longer the battery life in the end node device, the better.
Extended range – All wireless networks connecting to the Internet need to work through an access point (AP) of one kind or another: gateway, concentrator, or the like. So an IoT design needs to consider both the endpoint cost and the cost of the access point infrastructure needed to support the application.
Scalability – A given installation using a wide-area wireless IoT network may work well and the network may well have the capacity to handle any anticipated single user. But over time it’s reasonable to expect that many different installations will be made in the same geographic area.
Among the more established wireless networking technologies, only cellular and satellite communications offer the extended ranges that these applications require. Mesh networks such as ZigBee can potentially cover large areas but have limited scalability due to the need to forward traffic.
Unfortunately cellular and satellite communications technologies short in the other attributes. Their radio requirements involve higher energy use and complex protocols that lower battery life and increase cost beyond what many applications can sustain.
Still, some IoT applications and services – often called machine-to-machine (M2M) – did arise to leverage cellular and satellite communications networks. Many of them were based on the CDMA, or “2G” cellular technology. Unfortunately, those networks are now starting to be phased out by service providers in order to free spectrum for more advanced cellular technologies. However, the cellular community has made some strides toward improving the situation for M2M. The most recent specification for LTE (release 12) defined communications Category 0 designed around the needs of M2M traffic. Energy use and cost still remain concerns, however.
The various low-power, wide-area networking schemes on offer address these many needs and considerations in a variety of ways. Each has made a different choice of tradeoffs among interacting attributes such as battery life, data rate, operating frequency, achievable range, and scalability.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Things Hardware Kit Helps Green Pros Do Their Own Thing on the IoT
http://www.greenbuildermedia.com/internet-of-things/blog/iot-hardware-kit-helps-developers
Internet of Things Starter Kit cookbooks the connection of local data to the cloud for creators of smart products.
IBM AND ARM HAVE teamed up to create a kit to make devices for the Internet of Things (IoT).The ARM® mbed™ IoT Starter Kit contains boards that easily link to the Cloud.
Meg Divitto, vice president of IoT, IBM, says, “The Internet of Things is about bringing the physical and digital worlds closer together…In order to make this work,..it needs to be simple to connect physical devices into the cloud.”
ARMdataboard”
ARM Kit.Simple connections link to the IBM Cloud
ARM mbed does just that and offers the opportunity for green pros to develop their own take on the IoT and web-based services. ARM says its Ethernet Internet of Things (IoT) Starter Kit is “particularly suitable for developers with no specific experience in embedded or web development.”
- See more at: http://www.greenbuildermedia.com/internet-of-things/blog/iot-hardware-kit-helps-developers#sthash.2cPOB8Je.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Q&A with GloFo CEO: ‘IoT Is No Mystical Animal’
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327709&
PC shipments are going down all over the world. The smartphone market is losing steam. The chip industry is expecting a down year in 2016. Practically every chip vendor in the world is groping for growth drivers for the semiconductor market.
Globalfoundries’ CEO Sanjay Jha came to Shanghai this week and said that mobility and pervasive computing will continue to drive the industry. But he emphasized that many applications expected to drive the industry’s growth – which includes mass market smartphones, M2M, IoT and automotive – “don’t require the cost and complexity of FinFET.”
Instead, Jha pitched FD-SOI and RF-SOI as “the right technology at the right time,”
In his opinion, what will drive the chip industry forward are “emerging markets – the next 2 billion subscribers, 5G, social, machine-to-machine interaction, and content consumption.” The question, then, is what semiconductor companies can do about all this.
Jha said “cost, performance equivalent to today’s high-end smartphones and power consumption” are the three things semiconductors need to deliver.
IOT ‘no mystical animal’
The Globalfoundries’ CEO also touched upon IoT. Although everyone in the industry today talks about the Internet of Things as if it’s a mystical animal, Jha stressed “it is not. But first, we need to define it.”
He defined IoT as all devices “used in a sensorial environment, connected and share their sensor state with the Internet to optimize computing.”
For IoT, “Ultra-low power consumption isn’t an incidental fact,” said Jha. It’s the first and foremost requirement for semiconductors to make IoT happen.
Comparing IoT devices to a PC “which typically needs the power of 20kWh, running 3 to 4 hours” and a smartphone “that demands 2kWh, operating 24 hours,” Jha said, “IoT requires energy of 200 milliwatt-hours and it must last 2 years.” Equally important is its cost. “We are talking about an average selling price equivalent to $1.”
So, why FD-SOI and RF-SOI are the right technologies at the right time?
Jha, in his keynote, unequivocally stated that Globalfoundries’ 22nm FDSOI platform provides “14-nm FinFET-like performance at 28nm equivalent gate cost.” It offers ultra-low power, high performance “at 0.4V operating voltage.” Designers can also use software-controlled transistor body-biasing for further optimization, he added.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Standards light the way in enterprise IoT
http://www.embedded.com/design/connectivity/4440372/Standards-light-the-way-in-enterprise-IoT?_mc=EMB_FT_DEV_01
As organizations weigh the many variables around retrofitting for lighting and building control automation, now is the time to understand the value of open standards. For many organizations, the push for open standards will start with wireless lighting controls. The initial ROI calculations show lighting as the low-hanging fruit for initial entry into wireless control. By choosing open standard-based lighting control systems, organizations provide themselves with an easy upgrade to other related controls, such as thermostats, plug-loads, CO2 sensors, and more.
The flexibility of open standards allows the ability to tie into existing lighting control frameworks without needing to buy a separate system to manage each additional device or system. As a result, wireless lighting controls are a catalyst ushering building controls into the Enterprise Internet of Things (E-IoT).
In the early days of networking (pre-Ethernet protocol) proprietary protocols hurt adoption rates and held up networking innovation in the process. It wasn’t until Ethernet came onto the scene that the other interconnected technologies could proliferate.
By 2020, the growth of the smart lighting market is expected to reach $56 billion at an estimated CAGR of 16 percent, while the total global market for networked lighting controls will be over $5 billion. In an industry currently dominated by proprietary systems, it’s believed that open standards-based wireless technologies will be the catalyst for this amazing growth.
For designers and end-users alike, it is important to understand the definition of ‘open standards’. Standards are considered open when they are developed in an open, collaborative, and transparent process, are freely available, and can be implemented within any business model. Because global reach is key to wide implementation, open standards should be developed in a transparent process that is open to all interested parties worldwide.
It is critical that open standards are supported and maintained over time by an independent, trusted organization that is made up of a diverse group of stakeholders. In addition, open standards must be subject to full public evaluation and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all interested parties
ZigBee technology
ZigBee is the only open, global wireless standard to provide the foundation for the Internet of Things by enabling simple and smart objects to work together. It is an open standard that supports low data-rates, low-power consumption, security, and reliability. A critical difference between ZigBee and other technologies is the standardization of application-level functionality, among other key differences around power and bandwidth requirements. As a result, ZigBee enables embedded wireless communications for lighting and other building control devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your very own IoT: Let’s talk WiFi
http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say-what-/4440373/Your-very-own-IoT–Let-s-talk-WiFi?_mc=EMB_FT_DEV_01
Together, we will make an application that posts sensor information to an internet site that aggregates the information and plots it as pretty graphs. The solution will work in three distinct phases:
Provisioning phase: The board will function as an access point and a web server. The user will be able to connect to the access point, open the web browser, and see a web page where he needs to provide network and web credentials for a household access point and the data aggregation site.
Setup phase: The board will terminate the web server, connect to the data aggregation website, and set up the plots.
Sensor Machine phase: The board will run in periodic cycles, reading sensor data and posting it to the web
Tomi Engdahl says:
Portable environmental monitor
https://hackaday.io/project/4977-portable-environmental-monitor
A handheld, battery powered, sensor array unit for environmental monitoring focused mostly on air quality using a global infrastructure.
The portable environmental monitor addresses pollution, the kind that we are unable to see but directly affects our health and can cause life threatening diseases. Airborne toxic chemicals, radioactive dust and radioactive radon are correlated with cases of pulmonary cancer and asthma.
Last year I put my spare time to some really good use: I designed my first hardware product from scratch, and after prototyping and fixing software and hardware bugs it moved to production. This is how uRADMonitor was born, the first automated global radiation monitoring system, materialising in a short term a very ambitious goal!
The efforts have been recognised, and uRADMonitor went into semifinals in the HackADay.io 2014 competition. I didn’t conquer the space, but did a good job at ground level, spreading the network across several continents.
Now, the stakes are high: build something that matters!
Soon after building the Radiation Network I realised there are other problems, with higher occurrence than nuclear incidents. Friends suggested extending the capabilities of this infrastructure to cover pollution, something we’re all facing daily, in our crowded cities. These were the first directions.
Global radiation monitoring network
https://hackaday.io/project/1662-global-radiation-monitoring-network
The uRADMonitor is a plug-and-play, low power, self contained radiation monitoring device, connected to a centralised server component.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: Sharing Pollution Analytics
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/19/hackaday-prize-semifinalist-sharing-pollution-analytics/
A while ago, [Joshua Young] had a conversation with an environmental scientist. There aren’t many government-funded pollution monitoring stations around Texas, but there are a lot of well-off home owners associations in Houston that have the sensors to collect the data. Air quality monitoring is important, and more data is usually better, and without these HOA’s providing the data for free, these environmental scientists wouldn’t have the data to do their job.
[Joshua]’s project is taking the idea a few members of those HOA’s had and expanding it to the entire world. For his entry to the Hackaday Prize, he’s creating a system to share local pollution data with the entire Internet.
The system [Joshua] is building uses a suite of air quality sensors to measure sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone and particulate matter. These sensors connect to the Internet through either an ESP8266 WiFi module or a LoRa radio module, push the data onto the cloud, and let the entire world know what the air quality is.
Using tens of thousands of individual base stations to gather data has been done before; Weather Underground uses ten times as many weather stations than the National Weather Service
PASS: Pollution Analytics Shared Socially
https://hackaday.io/project/5530-pass-pollution-analytics-shared-socially
A community pollution monitoring system aggregating pollution data from individual station users to get information on the environment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Centrify:
IoT, the “Illusion of Trust” — Many businesses are placing trust in the cloud like they did for internal networks, without proper consideration for the challenges and deeper issues at hand. But the added convenience of cloud applications also comes with some serious potential downsides.
IoT, the “Illusion of Trust” — Moving Trust from the Network to Users and Devices
http://blog.centrify.com/internet-of-things-trust-cloud/
Our always on, always connected world has fundamentally changed how businesses operate. Communicating with customers and employees will never be the same again with cloud solutions bringing many benefits by making things easier for businesses, and it’s happening whether we like it or not.
But many businesses are placing trust in the cloud like they did for internal networks, without proper consideration for the challenges and deeper issues at hand. The added convenience of cloud applications also comes with a potential downside, such as potential security threats and surrender of control.
Many people are familiar with the acronym “IoT,” and we understand it to mean the Internet of Things. This is a catch-all term nowadays all things cloud and smart connected devices. We believe there’s another meaning for these three letters — “Illusion of Trust.” We call it the Illusion of Trust because business owners don’t realize that cloud security is an issue. When businesses move their intranet services and data to cloud providers, they are likely placing “blind trust” in a traditional network security model that is not entirely reliable anymore.
Leading organizations like Google, Coca-Cola, Verizon Communications Inc. and Mazda Motor Corp however are showing us examples that when they move their corporate applications to the Internet, they are also taking a new approach to enterprise security. It means flipping common corporate security practice on its head, shifting away from the idea of a trusted privileged internal corporate network secured by perimeter devices such as firewalls, in favor of a model where corporate data can be accessed from anywhere with the right device and user credentials.
The new enterprise security model should hence assume that the internal network is as dangerous as the Internet. Access should depend on the employee’s device and user credentials.
With this approach, trust is moved from the network level to the device level. Employees can only access corporate applications with a device that is procured and actively managed by the company.
Then comes a cloud identity service that performs single sign-on, a user authentication portal that validates employee use against the user database and group database, validates correct device security posture against the device inventory database, then generates short-lived authorization for access to specific resources and steps-up to strong authentication using mobile MFA for critical resources.
As companies adopt mobile and cloud technologies, the perimeter is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce, and it has made control and security harder — business owners are demanding solutions from their IT partners and providers, and this is where cloud identity providers play an important role to win the trust of businesses and cloud application providers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
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Low power wide-area networking alternatives for the IoT
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4440343/Low-power-wide-area-networking-alternatives-for-the-IoT?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20150918&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20150918&elq=d19e59bb6edb43fd87e15aeb9ba09842&elqCampaignId=24836&elqaid=28178&elqat=1&elqTrackId=85f3c7797dea4374b1a4aa0bcb1cc7ef
Wireless network technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth are fine for consumer applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), but many civic, industrial, and other IoT applications need to operate over vastly greater territory than these technologies can handle. Cellular and satellite machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies have traditionally filled the gap, but cost, power, and scalability concerns make these choices less appealing for the future. A number of low-power, wide-area networking (LP-WAN) alternatives have arisen that need careful consideration by developers looking to address these wide-ranging IoT applications.
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Q&A with GloFo CEO: ‘IoT Is No Mystical Animal’
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327709&
PC shipments are going down all over the world. The smartphone market is losing steam. The chip industry is expecting a down year in 2016. Practically every chip vendor in the world is groping for growth drivers for the semiconductor market.
Sanjay Jha (Photo: EE Times)
Sanjay Jha
(Photo: EE Times)
Globalfoundries’ CEO Sanjay Jha came to Shanghai this week and said that mobility and pervasive computing will continue to drive the industry. But he emphasized that many applications expected to drive the industry’s growth – which includes mass market smartphones, M2M, IoT and automotive – “don’t require the cost and complexity of FinFET.”
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OT ‘no mystical animal’
The Globalfoundries’ CEO also touched upon IoT. Although everyone in the industry today talks about the Internet of Things as if it’s a mystical animal, Jha stressed “it is not. But first, we need to define it.”
He defined IoT as all devices “used in a sensorial environment, connected and share their sensor state with the Internet to optimize computing.”
For IoT, “Ultra-low power consumption isn’t an incidental fact,” said Jha. It’s the first and foremost requirement for semiconductors to make IoT happen.
Comparing IoT devices to a PC “which typically needs the power of 20kWh, running 3 to 4 hours” and a smartphone “that demands 2kWh, operating 24 hours,” Jha said, “IoT requires energy of 200 milliwatt-hours and it must last 2 years.” Equally important is its cost. “We are talking about an average selling price equivalent to $1.”
Source: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327709&
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Company-Funded Hackathons; Now That’s a Great Idea
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=216&doc_id=1327753&
In addition to being fun for the employees, hackathon projects can be used to inspire customers to think outside the box.
Synapse have some rather interesting ultra-low-power wireless mesh network technology called SNAP, which is a bit like ZigBee except that it works (LOL).
To be fair to ZigBee, this little ragamuffin offers all the advantages you’d expect of something that’s been designed by a committee (or a consortium of companies) where all of the members have their own agendas. The end result is a somewhat bloated stack (~120KB the last I heard). Also, you typically create your user apps in C/C++, compile them with the stack, and then physically copy the stack-app combo into the wireless node(s). Furthermore, you have to recompile your stack-app combo for each target processor used in the nodes forming the mesh network.
By comparison, user applications intended for use with SNAP are created in Python and loaded “over the air” into the wireless nodes. Each node contains a SNAP stack, which was ~40KB the last I heard, and this includes a virtual Python machine, so your apps will run on any SNAP-enabled wireless node without recompilation, irrespective of the underlying processor.
Having fun things like hackathons are the sort of thing they do there, where these events are open to every member of the company — engineers and non-engineers alike.
The participants can use off-the-shelf Synapse wireless modules and suchlike as part of their projects, and the company also gives each of the participants $200 to use for additional components and supplies as required. Furthermore, the participants can band together to form teams if they wish (teams typically range from one to six people), in which case they can also pool their resources.
And the prize is… bragging rights, which is the way it should be. At 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning, after working on their projects for 24 hours, the teams get to present their masterpieces to each other. Later, they will also give a company-wide presentation at the next quarterly engineering meeting.
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IoT Boosting MCU Market, Says IHS
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327750&
The market for MCUs used in connected cars, wearable electronics, building automation and other IoT applications is expected to grow at an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent, from USD1.7 billion in 2014 to USD2.8 billion in 2019, according to market research company IHS Inc.
Meanwhile, the overall MCU market is expected to grow at a CAGR of just 4 percent through 2019.
“What some still consider to be only hype surrounding emerging IoT trends has already begun disrupting the MCU market,” said Tom Hackenberg, senior analyst for IHS Technology. “In fact, without the influence of IoT application growth, the MCU market is predicted to stagnate by the end of the decade.”
According to the latest Microcontroller Market Tracker from IHS Technology, IoT comprises both existing Internet-protocol- (IP-) addressable devices and Internet-connectable electronic devices. This definition differs from the Internet of everything (IoE), whereby even unconnected electronics and unconnected objects are expected to be represented on the Web.
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IoT Boosting MCU Market, Says IHS
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327750&
The market for MCUs used in connected cars, wearable electronics, building automation and other IoT applications is expected to grow at an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent, from USD1.7 billion in 2014 to USD2.8 billion in 2019, according to market research company IHS Inc.
Meanwhile, the overall MCU market is expected to grow at a CAGR of just 4 percent through 2019.
“What some still consider to be only hype surrounding emerging IoT trends has already begun disrupting the MCU market,” said Tom Hackenberg, senior analyst for IHS Technology. “In fact, without the influence of IoT application growth, the MCU market is predicted to stagnate by the end of the decade.”
According to the latest Microcontroller Market Tracker from IHS Technology, IoT comprises both existing Internet-protocol- (IP-) addressable devices and Internet-connectable electronic devices. This definition differs from the Internet of everything (IoE), whereby even unconnected electronics and unconnected objects are expected to be represented on the Web.
HS sub-divides the IoT market into three distinct categories: controllers, such as PCs and smartphones; infrastructure, such as routers and servers; and nodes, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, traffic lights and appliances. “Each of these categories offers a distinct opportunity for suppliers of hardware, software and services,” Hackenberg said.
“The IoT trend has a strong relationship with the MCU market, as the small nodes used for connectivity, and sensor hubs to collect and log data, are primarily based on MCU platforms,” Hackenberg continued. “Most serious suppliers of MCUs are already closely following the hype around the billions of connected devices; however, the industry’s challenge now is to quantify this new opportunity, since IoT is a conceptual trend, not a device, application or even a new feature.”
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Open Source Code May Unite IoT
Networking project spawns IoT middleware
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327732&
A high profile open source project working on software-defined networks has given birth to what could become an important standard for bringing unity to the fragmented Internet of Things.
A robust middleware platform can unlock innovation and fulfill the promise of the Internet of Things. Such an approach is the IoT Data Management (IoTDM) project, an open source middleware solution recently started at the Linux Foundation under the auspices of the OpenDaylight project.
OpenDaylight is the leading open source platform for software-defined networking (SDN). Its latest release is expected to be embedded in over 20 commercial products, and it is being embraced by other open source projects including the Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and OpenStack.
The core OpenDaylight software allows computer networking applications to intelligently access and configure hardware network elements. Similarly, IoTDM provides a service layer that acts as an IoT data broker and enables authorized applications to post and retrieve IoT data uploaded by any device.
IoTDM is compliant with the oneM2M effort which provides an architectural framework for connecting disparate devices via a common service layer where a given application can be associated with a dynamic network of users, devices and sensor data. The service layer allows users and operators to control, for example, how often a remote sensor captures data or to reconfigure devices with a needed security update. The oneM2M project is backed by more than 200 technology companies, standards bodies and government agencies.
The IoTDM platform can be configured for the needs of various use cases. It can deliver only IoT data collection capabilities where it is deployed near IoT devices and its footprint needs to be small; or it can be configured to run as a large, distributed cluster with IoT, SDN and NFV functions enabled and deployed in a big data center.
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Smart Battery Startup Raises $5.5 Million
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327736&
Roost Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), a startup that is trying to retrofit IoT functions and connectivity into consumer electronics by including them in a battery form factor, has raised $5.5 million in a Series A round of financing.
This brings the amount raised by Roost to $6.5 million.
The company has developed a PP3 format 9V battery for smoke alarms that also houses a computer node that can link to a smoke phone via Wi-Fi. An application on the smartphone can be used to switch off false alarms and it can be used to alert the owner to smoke alarm activity. The unit still functions as a battery and can last for five years and will warn of low battery status via the app.
The Roost battery is priced at $34.99.
“Roost is blazing a path for the broad adoption of IoT in the home,”
http://www.getroost.com/
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Design Options for Next Billion IoT Devices
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327743&
We’ve all heard enough about the 20 to 50 billion connected devices that are supposed to flood the market by 2020. On one hand, the big numbers expected for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) market have stirred hope in the semiconductor industry. On the other, many chipmakers are feeling IoT fatigue before the promised market is born.
Sanjay Jha, CEO of Globalfoundries came to the Shanghai FD-SOI Forum last week, and told the audience that it’s time for the industry to define IoT. More important, he said that the industry must develop realistic strategies to meet the technical requisites of IoT devices.
Among a surfeit of theories, predictions and technology horse-race stories on IoT, it’s time to hear from someone who has actually done the due diligence, made design choices and developed his own new IoT chipset.
He defines IoT devices as “almost free,” with a multi-year battery life and a very small foot print while featuring “world-wide connectivity.”
Following these parameters, he sought 18 months ago a chip solution to enable a sub-$5 finished product, with average power consumption at less than 100mA.
“We wanted to make sure that the IoT device survives on a coin battery,” said Bagalkotkar. The module had to be “inconspicuous,” as it is there to track location, temperature, pressure and other data, he said. The design goal was also set to enable worldwide connection via LTE.
The solution the Synapse’s team came up with is a full-LTE chipset consisting of sensors, modem ASIC and RF ASIC.
The chip set demands “smart architecture, process technology for extreme low power, efficient software and firmware and LTE compliance,” he concluded.
The crux, though, is that the chipset must meet two opposite requirements. On one end, it must consume “little to no power,” while on the other, it requires high frequency.
Standby mode
The biggest challenge for its modem ASIC is that it must achieve “extreme low leakage when in standby mode.” Bagalkotkar said, “We realize that standby power consumes most of the energy.” That implies that an “always ON” block with state retention is necessary and standby current less than 10uA, he explained.
Equally important in the modem ASIC is to enable high CPU MIPS in active mode. Bagalkotkar explained that LTE signal processing and protocol stack demand clocks of 300+MHZ, to ensure peak transmission power. Other requirements include low execution latency and minimizing dynamic power.
Synapse Design looked at a few different technology options to achieve these goals. The process options they examined included: 40nm LP, 28nm Bulk and 28nm FD-SOI
Beyond Synapse, other vendors have wondered if they could get away with a low-cost 40nm LP to enable IoT devices.
Bagalkotkar said, “40nm LP’s low mask cost could be attractive.” However, he noted that 40nm LP falls short of the performance requirement for an IoT device he had to design. More specifically, it doesn’t offer high dynamic power. Its vdd (voltage drain drain) range is limited and its die size is too large.
The Synapse team also looked at 28LP bulk. Its high performance, small die and low dynamic power make 28LP bulk a good option. But it was rejected as a viable option for IoT devices because of its “higher standby power,” said Bagalkotkar, along with limited low vdd operation.
Design Choice
Synapse in the end chose to go with 28nm FD-SOI. The process technology met all prerequisites, including high performance, small die, low dynamic power, very low standby power and wider vdd range, said Bagalkotkar. Body biasing further optimizes lower standby power, he added. Its only drawback? “No well known FD-SOI-based products in the market yet,” he said.
Synapse’s IoT chipset is designed for an M2M device. Its LTE connection complies to LTE CAT 3 Release 9. The purpose for this particular M2M device is to take sensor data and send it directly to the cloud.
Bagalkotkar is not disclosing the name of the company who will be using his IoT chipset. The company is still “in a stealth mode.”
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Dialog to Acquire Atmel for USD4.6bn in IoT Push
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327749&
U.K.-based Dialog Semiconductor PLC is to buy Atmel Corp. in a $4.6 billion cash-and-stock deal in a move to try and capture a larger slice of the Internet of Things (IOT) market.
Dialog sells chips used to manage power in high-end smartphones from Apple Inc. and others. Atmel, based in San Jose, Calif., focuses on microcontrollers that provide computing power for many kinds of consumer and business hardware.