4 reasons why Atmel is ready to ride the IoT wave

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The IoT recipe comprises of three key technology components: Sensing, computing and communications.

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In 2014, a Goldman Sachs’ report took many people by surprise when it picked Atmel Corporation as the company best positioned to take advantage of the rising Internet of Things (IoT) tsunami. At the same time, the report omitted tech industry giants like Apple and Google from the list of companies that could make a significant impact on the rapidly expanding IoT business. So what makes Atmel so special in the IoT arena?

The San Jose, California–based chipmaker has been proactively building its ‘SMART’ brand of 32-bit ARM-based microcontrollers that boasts an end-to-end design platform for connected devices in the IoT realm. The company with two decades of experience in the MCU business was among the first to license ARM’s low-power processors for IoT chips that target smart home, industrial automation, wearable electronics and more.

Goldman Sachs named Atmel a leader in the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

Goldman Sachs named Atmel a leader in the Internet of Things (IoT) market

A closer look at the IoT ingredients and Atmel’s product portfolio shows why Goldman Sachs called Atmel a leader in the IoT space. For starters, Atmel is among the handful of chipmakers that cover all the bases in IoT hardware value chain: MCUs, sensors and wireless connectivity.

1. A Complete IoT Recipe

The IoT recipe comprises of three key technology components: Sensing, computing and communications. Atmel offers sensor products and is a market leader in MCU-centric sensor fusion solutions than encompass context awareness, embedded vision, biometric recognition, etc.

For computation—handling tasks related to signal processing, bit manipulation, encryption, etc.—the chipmaker from Silicon Valley has been offering a diverse array of ARM-based microcontrollers for connected devices in the IoT space.

Atmel has reaffirmed its IoT commitment through a number of acquisitions.

Finally, for wireless connectivity, Atmel has cobbled a broad portfolio made up of low-power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee radio technologies. Atmel’s $140 million acquisition of Newport Media in 2014 was a bid to accelerate the development of low-power Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips for IoT applications. Moreover, Atmel could use Newport’s product expertise in Wi-Fi communications for TV tuners to make TV an integral part of the smart home solutions.

Furthermore, communications across the Internet depends on the TCP/IP stack, which is a 32-bit protocol for transmitting packets on the Internet. Atmel’s microcontrollers are based on 32-bit ARM cores and are well suited for TCP/IP-centric Internet communications fabric.

2. Low Power Leadership

In February 2014, Atmel announced the entry-level ARM Cortex M0+-based microcontrollers for the IoT market. The SAM D series of low-power MCUs—comprising of D21, D10 and D11 versions—featured Atmel’s signature high-end features like peripheral touch controller, USB interface and SERCOM module. The connected peripherals work flawlessly with Cortex M0+ CPU through the Event System that allows system developers to chain events in software and use an event to trigger a peripheral without CPU involvement.

According to Andreas Eieland, Director of Product Marketing for Atmel’s MCU Business Unit, the IoT design is largely about three things: Battery life, cost and ease-of-use. The SAM D microcontrollers aim to bring the ease-of-use and price-to-performance ratio to the IoT products like smartwatches where energy efficiency is crucial. Atmel’s SAM D family of microcontrollers was steadily building a case for IoT market when the company’s SAM L21 microcontroller rocked the semiconductor industry in March 2015 by claiming the leadership in low-power Cortex-M IoT design.

Atmel’s SAM L21 became the lowest power ARM Cortex-M microcontroller when it topped the EEMBC benchmark measurements. It’s plausible that another MCU maker takes over the EEMBC benchmarks in the coming months. However, according to Atmel’s Eieland, what’s important is the range of power-saving options that an MCU can bring to product developers.

“There are many avenues to go down on the low path, but they are getting complex,” Eieland added. He quoted features like multiple clock domains, event management system and sleepwalking that provide additional levels of configurability for IoT product developers. Such a set of low-power technologies that evolves in successive MCU families can provide product developers with a common platform and a control on their initiatives to lower power consumption.

3. Coping with Digital Insecurity

In the IoT environment, multiple device types communicate with each other over a multitude of wireless interfaces like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy. And IoT product developers are largely on their own when it comes to securing the system. The IoT security is a new domain with few standards and IoT product developers heavily rely on the security expertise of chip suppliers.

Atmel offers embedded security solutions for IoT designs.

Atmel, with many years of experience in crypto hardware and Trusted Platform Modules, is among the first to offer specialized security hardware for the IoT market. It has recently shipped a crypto authentication device that has integrated the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) security protocol. Atmel’s ATECC508A chip provides confidentiality, data integrity and authentication in systems with MCUs or MPUs running encryption/decryption algorithms like AES in software.

4. Power of the Platform

The popularity of 8-bit AVR microcontrollers is a testament to the power of the platform; once you learn to work on one MCU, you can work on any of the AVR family microcontrollers. And same goes for Atmel’s Smart family of microcontrollers aimed for the IoT market. While ARM shows a similarity among its processors, Atmel exhibits the same trait in the use of its peripherals.

Low-power SAM L21 builds on features of SAM D MCUs.

A design engineer can conveniently work on Cortex-M3 and Cortex -M0+ processor after having learned the instruction set for Cortex-M4. Likewise, Atmel’s set of peripherals for low-power IoT applications complements the ARM core benefits. Atmel’s standard features like sleep modes, sleepwalking and event system are optimized for ultra-low-power use, and they can extend IoT battery lifetime from years to decades.

Atmel, a semiconductor outfit once focused on memory and standard products, began its transformation toward becoming an MCU company about eight years ago. That’s when it also started to build a broad portfolio of wireless connectivity solutions. In retrospect, those were all the right moves. Fast forward to 2015, Atmel seems ready to ride on the market wave created by the IoT technology juggernaut.

Interested? You may also want to read:

Atmel’s L21 MCU for IoT Tops Low Power Benchmark

Atmel’s New Car MCU Tips Imminent SoC Journey

Atmel’s Sensor Hub Ready to Wear

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Majeed Ahmad is author of books Smartphone: Mobile Revolution at the Crossroads of Communications, Computing and Consumer Electronics and The Next Web of 50 Billion Devices: Mobile Internet’s Past, Present and Future.

ChipWhisperer-Lite is an educational board for embedded security

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ChipWhisperer is the first open-source toolchain for embedded hardware security research including side-channel power analysis and glitching.

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Side-channel power analysis refers to a method of breaking implementations of completely secure algorithms such as AES-256. Such capabilities have been known for a long time – the attack was first published in 1998. But even today many consider side-channel attacks exotic, and don’t take them seriously when designing secure systems. That is why Canadian startup NewAE Technology has launched a new project to help inform designers that they need to take these threats seriously, by teaching them how the attacks work!

Recently debuted on Kickstarter, the aptly named ChipWhisperer-Lite is essentially an educational tool, designed to introduce embedded enthusiasts to the area of side-channel power analysis. You may also recall the project from last year’s Hackaday Prize, where it garnered second place accolades.

Side-channel attacks aren’t magic; in fact, it is possible to design systems which are resistant to them. For instance, Atmel has a line of secure processors which would have encryption peripherals which cannot easily be attacked. Another example is the ATAES132 device – again this has resistance against side-channel attacks, so you could be more confident in the security of that device, compared to a generic microcontroller with an AES hardware peripheral (such as the AVR XMEGA). It’s all about managing the risk!

Additionally, the ChipWhisperer-Lite required a high-speed USB interface, and so, the NewAE Technology team turned to the Atmel | SMART SAM3U2C to accomplish this feat.

“While a number of systems are designed around generic interface chips, using a high-speed USB microcontroller gave me a lot more flexibility. In addition the cost of the microcontroller chip was cheaper than the stand-alone interface chip I would have used, so all these benefits came at no penalty to the BOM cost,” writes company co-founder Colin O’Flynn.

This shows the basic connections between the SAM3U2C and the FPGA. The external memory interface on the SAM3U2C is used to simplify data and control transfer to and from the FPGA.

According to O’Flynn, the SAM3U family was selected based on set of criteria:

• High-speed USB 2.0 interface
• External memory interface with programmable timing parameters
• TQFP Package (as he wanted people to be able to build this project themselves)
• Lower cost than standalone interface chip (he had been looking for roughly $3-$4 in a quantity of 1,000)
• ROM-resident USB bootloader (so that people building their own don’t need a programmer, and makes the board unbrickable)

“The external memory interface is actually critical to achieving a simple FPGA interface. This allows me to memory-map sections of the FPGA right into the SAM3U processor memory. If transferring data over USB to the FPGA, I can point the USB code from the Atmel Software Framework (ASF) to the location in the FPGA I want the data to go,” O’Flynn adds. “This means no need to copy the data multiple times between buffers, or use some specialized protocol to transfer data from the microcontroller to the FPGA.”

Beyond that, the SAM3U2C simplifies system management. Meeting USB sleep mode current limits (2.5 mA) means shutting off the FPGA and analog portions of the board. Standalone interface chips provide a ‘SUSPEND’ output which you can use, but having the microcontroller offered much more control, which ChipWhisperer-Lite’s creators were able to use for meeting inrush current limits.

The USB standard has limits on the inrush current; this current occurs when the USB device is plugged in and all the capacitors start charging. To avoid exceeding these currents most boards need a ‘soft-start,’ where power supplies are turned on after some delay (or after the USB device finishes enumerating).

“Putting this in the microcontroller gives me control over that delay if fine-tuning is needed, or even having the option of adding multiple switches or slower ramps using a PWM output,” says O’Flynn.

This shows the switch for the FPGA and analog power supplies. Depending on the total load, an RC filter can be added to slow the turn-on speed of the FETs.

Using the SAM3U2C also provided a nice set of peripherals to use, too. The ChipWhisperer-Lite required a ‘target’ device that the user (i.e. student) programs with their algorithm of interest. For this case, the team selected an XMEGA MCU to serve as a programmable target for the student.

The XMEGA device can easily be programmed with only two wires (PDI), and this is generated by one of the SPI modules in the SAM3U. O’Flynn also used a USART module to communicate with the XMEGA, and finally another SPI module to download configuration data to the FPGA.

“While generic interface chips often have support for serial protocols (such as SPI or USARTs), the problem is they are normally limited in the number of channels offered, or I couldn’t use the serial-interface mode at the same time as high-speed parallel interface mode.”

In addition the details of the protocol (such as the low-level PDI programming protocol for the XMEGA) go into the firmware on the SAM3U2C, simplifying the higher-layer USB interface.

“I find it easier to develop those low-level protocols on an embedded system from within Atmel Studio 6.2, compared to trying to send timing-specific information across the USB bus to be processed by the interface chip! Anytime you can avoid USB debugging is time well spent in my books,” O’Flynn emphasizes. “Using an ASF application example as a starting point for the whole application let me rocket through development, with satisfyingly few moments of pounding my head against the desk figuring out why things weren’t working!”

A final nicety of the design was the ability to use the unique ID programmed into the SAM3U2C as part of the USB device serial number. In other words, the NewAE Technology crew could generate unique serial numbers for each device without requiring any special manufacturing step – every device is loaded with the same binary firmware yet still has a unique serial number. As an end-user, having unique USB serial numbers improves the experience since otherwise Windows will reload the driver when you change the USB port the device is plugged into.

“We’re eliminating the problem for good by making the tools open-source. Because this whole area is an active research area, the tools need to be open-source. This isn’t a case of attempting to seem sexy by adding the word ‘open-source’, but placing something of commercial value into the open-source domain, in the hope it spurs a larger community. This includes hours of tutorials on this area, more than just a few board files and some source code.”

Indeed, this project was devised as a fairly advanced piece of test equipment for well-seasoned Makers, embedded developers and computer engineers. That being said, it is important to note that it is not Arduino-compatible, nor does it work with Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone. However, O’Flynn does reveal that an Arduino-compatible, ATmega328P based target board is in the works. Impressively, ChipWhisperer-Lite also enables users to snap off the ‘target board,’ giving them both a main measurement tool and a target device.

Interested in learning more? You can head over to its official Kickstarter page, where the team is well on its way to achieving its $50,000 goal. Pending all goes to plan, shipment is slated for August 2015.