Atmel wireless connectivity supports industrial IoT revolution

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The BTLC1000 exhibits the lowest BLE power consumption in the industry.

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With both this year’s CES and Embedded World now behind us, it’ll be interesting to see which of the gadgets unveiled during these shows find a way to market — some will go to production, others won’t. I am skeptic about the smart shoe offering self-fastening mechanism… And during these two weeks, the IoT revolution has silently progressed in industrial automation. (You will be surprised if you read some very serious white papers extracted from the Internet of Things series published by Bosch.)

While attendees flocked to Vegas, progresses were made in industrial automation thanks to hard work being done in Germany. In fact, these two worlds — consumer oriented and industrial — are both relying on wireless connectivity, including products from Atmel: the ATWILC1000, ATWILC1500 or ATWILC3000 supporting Wi-Fi and ATBLC1000 supporting BTLE 4.1,which  was recently crowned “Product of the Year” from Electronic Products.

According to Bosch’s white paper “Leveraging the Internet of Things: Companies can streamline business processes for stakeholders across the extended enterprise,” we realize that Bosch’s managers have brainstormed about the IoT to extract the added business value for the enterprise, like for example, “in manufacturing, data automatically collected from smart and connected products, give companies meaningful feedback as to how products should be reengineered, and provides opportunities for additional revenue through selling services.”

In order to become smart and connected, industrial products need to integrate either a Wi-Fi connection supported by ATWINC1500, or a Bluetooth supported by the very tiny (see above) ATBTLC1000.

Shows the requirements for scalability on two current customer PoCs at Bosch Software Innovations. These PoCs start in year one with a very low umber of connected devices and sensors. However, in a short space of time, they scale massively upward for commercial launch and rollout.

From the above graphic, extracted from another white paper from Bosch, “Realizing the connected world-how to choose the right IoT platform,” we can derive two crucial information. The first is the fact that IoT is already a reality in the industrial market segment, not really known to be fashion driven like could be consumer electronic. The second information is about scalability. In both examples, the number of connected devices was very low, but in a short space of time they scale massively, reaching 500k devices for the first and up to 3 million for the other. A single industrial automation application can generate a very good semiconductor business, including sensors, MCU and wireless connectivity device. In our previous blog, we have investigated the ATWINCxx00 family bringing Wi-Fi connectivity to any embedded design. Let’s take a look at the award winner ATBTLC1000 device supporting BT 4.1 connectivity.

The BTLC1000 is an ultra-low power Bluetooth SMART (BLE 4.1) SoC with an integrated ARM Cortex-M0 MCU, a transceiver, a modem, MAC, PA, TR Switch, and a power management unit (PMU). It can be used as a BLE link controller or data pump with external host MCU, or as a standalone applications processor with embedded BLE connectivity and external memory. If we look at the key features list:

• BLE4.1 compliant SoC and protocol stack
• Lowest BLE power consumption in industry
• Smallest BLE 4.1 SoC — Available in WLCSP (2.26×2.14mm) or QFN ( 32p 4×4 mm)
• Optimized system cost — High level of integration on chip reduces external Bill of Material significantly
• Wide operating Voltage range — 1.8 – 4.3V
• Host Interface — SPI or UART
• Certified modules — FCC, ETSI/CE, TELEC
• Enterprise Development support & tools with the ATBTLC1000 Xplained Pro

The main reasons why the Atmel BTLC1000 has won the Electronic Design award are power, cost and certification. This chip not only exhibits the lowest BLE power consumption in the industry, it’s also the smallest BLE 4.1 SoC (see picture) offering optimized system cost, thanks to high level of integration. If companies like Bosch supporting industrial automation segment for years (if not centuries) start to be seriously involved into smart connected IoT systems, no doubt that ATBTLC1000 and ATWILC1000 devices have a bright future…

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This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Eric Esteve is a principle blogger and one of the four founding members of the site. This blog first appeared on SemiWiki on January 10, 2016.

Atmel implements Intel EPID technology on all SmartConnect wireless solutions

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Atmel is collaborating with Intel on EPID technology to enable more secure IoT applications.

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Atmel is working with Intel to bring more secure Internet of Things applications to market. In this collaboration, Atmel will support Intel Enhanced Privacy ID (Intel EPID) technology on all Atmel SmartConnect wireless solutions to improve secure cloud provisioning — the mutual authentication of the IoT node with the cloud — in the rapidly growing IoT market where devices are becoming increasingly more connected.

With tens of billions of devices anticipated by 2020, security is surely one of the most critical components to enabling a seamless connection between the edge node and the cloud. To accomplish this, Atmel offers a complete portfolio of IoT solutions that combine both Atmel | SMART MCUs along with SmartConnect wireless technologies ranging from Wi-Fi, 802.15.4 and Bluetooth, and other secure products. This newly-announced effort will give developers implementing these wireless solutions the option to use the trusted Intel EPID identification standard in their next gizmo or gadget.

“Implementing Intel EPID offers IoT designers a truly seamless edge-to-cloud Internet of Things platform with proven security options available with our broad Internet of Things portfolio,” said Kaivan Karimi, Atmel’s Vice President and General Manager of Wireless Solutions. “With this new technology, Atmel’s SmartConnect wireless and IoT solutions now support Intel EPID, a security technology that has been proven over the last 5 years.”

For those who may not know, Intel EPID is an ISO standard for identity and privacy that has been shipping in Intel platforms since 2011. The technology delivers a hardware root of trust and is PKI compatible. With Intel EPID, devices can be identified and a secure communication can be linked between these devices. Additionally, the group membership can be determined without revealing the identity of the specific platform allowing for another level of security. Intel EPID can dynamically assign and revoke group memberships by individuals. Even more, this technology meets the latest protected key delivery requirements for content and data protection protocols.

“With the rapidly growing IoT ecosystem, security is key, and Intel EPID is a proven secure technology that can provide the billions of devices in this new market with a common security foundation. By implementing Intel EPID technology, Atmel is enabling a more secure, seamless IoT platform,” explained Lori Wigle, Intel’s General Manager of IoT Security.

Atmel launches IoT Cloud Ecosystem Partner Program

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Atmel’s Cloud Ecosystem Partner Program accelerates time-to-market for developers creating next-generation IoT solutions.

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Good news, IoT developers! Atmel has just announced its Internet of Things Cloud Ecosystem Partner Program, providing those using Atmel | SMART MCUs and Atmel SmartConnect wireless solutions with access to a wide range of market-leading ecosystem cloud partners for device management, data analytics and visualization in order to experience end-to-end, out-of-the-box IoT solution development.

With the ever-increasing need to collect, visualize and analyze data from IoT edge nodes and to manage the associated services, cloud connectivity is becoming an essential element for product development. Aside from that, device management has also emerged as an important aspect of cloud services as more gizmos and gadgets are performing functions through remote management. Take a connected thermostat, for example, that is programmed remotely and sends climate information back to the user’s RC device reducing overall power consumption while providing a better user experience.

Each cloud partner in this program not only brings a unique, distinct feature to the IoT ecosystem for developers using Atmel solutions but offers production-ready software stacks ported on Atmel wireless platforms to help accelerate time-to-market as well. Developers can now easily connect to the cloud through various software as a service (SaaS) options, based on their use-case requirements early in the development cycle. Additionally, Atmel is in the process of onboarding multiple cloud service partners providing regional and vertical expertise where required. Among the names on the growing list are PubNub, Proximetry, Exosite and Arrayent.

“We are excited to team with Atmel to deliver to their customers a highly secure solution for bi-directional device communication and control,” says Todd Greene, PubNub CEO. “Our highly reliable and massively scalable Data Stream Network provides companies with real-time infrastructure and a robust feature set for architecting their IoT solutions. Our partnership with Atmel offers the only ‘out of the box’ solution for IoT developers to create secure IoT products, reducing risk and accelerating time-to-market.”

With the anticipated growth of billions of devices by 2020 in the IoT market, secure cloud services will be a critical element to ensure Internet accessibility connectivity of these smart devices. The partner program ensures developers have the opportunity to design with Atmel’s pre-certified Wi-Fi, 802.15.4, and multimode modules and Atmel | SMART MCUs to provide a seamless end-to-end solution from the edge node to the cloud with a simple, plug-and-play connection that works out of the box.

“Our cloud services are integrated into several leading Atmel | SMART MCUs, SmartConnect and security modules,” adds Tracy Trent, Proximetry CEO. “We provide leading software solutions that enable the management of the most critical of things in the IoT including remote access and secure data management. With our services integrated into Atmel’s leading products, IoT developers now have a true end-to-end solution from the edge node to the cloud.”

What’s more, IoT developers can simply use any of the compatible Atmel development boards for access to the application programming interface (API) to qualified cloud partners. In order to expire the design process, several development kits are available with access to Atmel Cloud Partners like the WINC1500-XSTK, the SAMW25-XPRO, the SAMR21-XPRO and the Arduino Zero.

“Launching this highly anticipated IoT ecosystem partner program, we are now one of the few suppliers that delivers solutions from the edge node to the cloud, along with full software support. We are excited to team with these unique cloud service companies and look forward to adding many more,” explains Reza Kazerounian, SVP and GM of Microcontroller Business Unit at Atmel.

Securing the Internet of Streams

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The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion.

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The relentless flow of new product introductions keeps fueling the gargantuan estimates of billions of connected communicating computing devices which is projected to imminently make the Internet of Things ubiquitous within every facet of our lives. The IoT has been portrayed as the key enabler of a smarter world with compelling use cases that cut across a wide array of both personal and industrial ecosystems.

A great description is that the IoT is the global nervous system. This could be a pun, as IoT is increasingly producing troubling headlines. Stories abound, detailing security breaches that sound as if they were taken from a sci-fi movie, from hacked security cameras to a spamming refrigerator.

Figure 1 (Source: re-workblog.tumblr.com)

The explosive growth of the IoT coincides with an alarming increase in reported rates of identity theft and hacker attacks on everyday gadgets and appliances. Security researchers have easily established the feasibility of attacks against TVs, cars, security cameras, and medical equipment. There is much more than stolen money on the line if these types of attacks are carried out. The evidence demonstrates that existing security mechanisms are insufficient or ill-suited to address the risks inherent with the ubiquitous deployment of the IoT.

The need for a new original approach

The traditional approach to security, applied to both consumer and business domains, is one of separation – preventing those who are considered bad actors from accessing devices and networks. However, the dynamic topology of the network environments in which IoT applications are deployed largely invalidates the separation approach, making it both impractical and overly rigid. For example, with BYOD (bring-your-own-device), enterprises struggle to apply traditional security schemes to devices that may have been compromised while outside the perimeter firewall.

Many IoT devices self-configure and run autonomously. User interaction is limited to the devices’ operations, and there are no means to change security parameters. These devices rely on the manufacturer to implement security, both in the hardware and the software.

Moreover, manufacturers have to consider the broader ecosystem, not just their own products. For example, recent research has revealed inherent security flaws in USB memory stick controller hardware and firmware. Users must be concerned not only about the safety of the data on the memory stick, but if the memory stick controller itself has somehow been compromised.

To thwart similar issues, IoT device vendors are rushing to upgrade their product portfolios to low-power, high-performance microcontrollers that include firmware upgrade and data encryption mechanisms.

Figure 2 (Source: Atmel’s White Paper: Integrating the Internet of Things)

In the hyper-connected world of IoT, security breaches will gravitate towards the weakest link in the chain. It will become very hard to maintain the confidence that any particular device, user, application or service maintains its integrity; instead, the assumption will be that things will occasionally break for a variety of reasons, over which there is little control and no method for fixing. As a result, IoT will force the adoption of new concepts for the establishment of trust.

A smarter network combined

In the loosely coupled world of IoT, security issues are driving a need for greater collaboration among the vendors participating in the ecosystem, recognizing their respective core competencies. Hardware vendors make devices smarter. Software developers make applications and services smarter. The connective tissue, the global Internet with its myriad of communication transports and protocols, is tasked with carrying the data that powers IoT. This begs the question – can the network be made an enabler of IoT security by becoming smarter in its own right?

Context is essential for identifying and handling security threats and is best understood at the application level, where the intent of information is processed. This points towards a higher-level communication framework for IoT – the Internet of Data Streams. This framework enables apps and services to view things as consumers and producers of data. It allows for descriptive representations of devices’ operational status and real-time detection of their presence or absence.

Elevating the functional value of the Internet, from a medium of communication to a network of data streams for IoT, would be highly beneficial to ease collaboration among the IoT ecosystem participants. The smarter network can provide apps and services with the ability to implement logic that detects things that break or misbehave, flagging them as suspect while ensuring graceful and consistent operation using the redundant resources.

For example, a smarter network can detect that a connected sensor stopped functioning (e.g. due to a denial of power attack, possibly triggered through some obscure security loophole) and allow the apps that depend on the sensor to provide uninterrupted service to users. Additionally, a network of data streams can foster a global industry of security-as-a-service solutions, which can, as an example, send real-time security alerts to app administrators and device manufacturers.

The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion. Addressing the surfaced issues from an ecosystem standpoint calls for apps, services and “things” to explicitly handle communication via a smarter data network, which has the promise of placing IoT in safer hands, courtesy of the Internet of Streams.

Leadership in IoT connectivity with Bluetooth Smart

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Kaivan Karimi, Atmel VP and GM of Wireless Solutions, provides insight into the Internet of Things and the role of BLE connectivity. 

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It has been a year since my last blog at my old gig, and what a year it has been. I am now at Atmel managing the wireless MCUs business unit, and with my team busy building the best in class portfolio of cloud-ready wireless MCUs and MPUs. Last year was a great ride, and things will only get better from here onward, as we now have established a solid IP base, a best-in-class execution engine, and a great ecosystem of partners to collectively offer cost-optimized Internet of Things (IoT) edge-node system solutions.

Six years ago when a few of us in the industry were evangelizing what in those days we called “Industrial Wireless” (and now dubbed IoT), we always talked about role of hierarchical gateways, connecting the “edge nodes” or “things” to the “cloud.” Some of those “things” use your smartphone as their gateway of choice to connect to the cloud, while others will use a new generation of “smart gateways” to manage cloud-based services. Even in the case of the new smart gateways, some of the things connected to them may get “provisioned” using your smartphone. With smartphones almost ubiquitously having integrated Bluetooth Smart Ready, one can see how BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy – aka Bluetooth Smart) plays an important role in the connectivity infrastructure of IoT.

This year’s CES was as amazing as ever with even more attendees, exhibits and technology than in 2014. As usual, a sea of tech gadgets shouting at you while you walking through the halls, “Look at me and remember me because I am the next best things since slice bread and I am here to stay!” And, sometimes that actually happens (HD Television – CES 1998) and sometimes it doesn’t (3D Television- CES 2009).

CES 2015 was a special one for me, and served as a sort of coming out party for our new wireless lineup. There, we announced a pair of products: a standalone Bluetooth Smart SoC and a dual-mode Wi-Fi/Bluetooth platform. (I will spend more time on our combo chip in the near future, but wanted to focus this blog on our BLE chip.)

It started when we met with our engineering team and discussed our target spec for our new BLE SoC. It was simple; last year the small German mixed signal company had the best-in-class BLE solution in the market. Based on the marketing material they had readily available on the web, their solution had the best peak transmit and receive current (less than 5mA), it had the best leakage current of 600 nA (in certain mode), and it was the smallest SoC out there 2.5×2.5mm WLCSP. Furthermore, the solution also listed the usual suspect key applications as smartphone accessories, PC and tablet peripherals, sport and fitness tracking, health monitoring, self-tracking, watches, remote controls, 3D glasses, etc.

As it turned out, by mid-last year the engineering team of the German company forced their marketing team to match their peak active current numbers to the reality of the chip, as well as adjust their leakage current to reality for adequate memory retention. The leakage current listing is related to the amount of memory you need to retain for the modem to go back to the original state after coming back to active mode, and best in class BLE modems need minimum 8K of memory space to retain their state, and anything less than that would require reestablishing the link, which burns a lot more power. Listing your leakage current for anything less than 8K of memory retention is misleading. Needless to say, the spec being advertised for that chip are now different than their original product brief.

In any business best-in-class doesn’t come easy, and is as it is said to be the result of a lot of sweat and tears… So when we told our team that we wanted them to beat those spec by 30%, with samples for March 2015, you can imagine the looks we got in return. The team however took it upon themselves to beat our targets. The result: BTLC1000. Announced at CES, notable features from the press release included:

• Bluetooth Smart solutions set new low-power standards with at least 30% power savings compared to existing solutions on the market in dynamic mode
• Packaged in extremely small 2.1mm x 2.1mm WLCSP package to enable design flexibility for all devices
• Solution can be combined with any Atmel MCU for a complete IoT platform

In the body of the announcement we also mentioned “sub-1µA in standby mode, while delivering the industry’s best dynamic power consumption, increasing battery life by as much as one year for certain applications.” Since this blog is not under NDA, I cannot get into more details on exact numbers, only that they are real, and they do indeed beat the relevant best-in-class BLE product specifications out there by >30%. Like true IoT products, this product is built from the ground up for IoT applications and battery operations, and not a generic modem repurposed and rebranded as an IoT product.

Small footprint such as 2.1mmx2.1mm facilitates innovative form factors for a variety of classes of products, while also enables adding BLE functionality to your existing products using other types of wireless connectivity for provisioning only.

A common misconception for the Internet of Things is that everyone calls IoT the era of “always on” connectivity. However, in reality most of the “things” in IoT spend most of their life in “off” mode, and only based on an event, or predetermined policy at certain intervals of time they wake up, hence leakage current is extremely important. A lot of the BLE-related products use lithium coin cells which are made to work with standard current draws of 1 to 5 mA. There are many factors such as the discharge rate, the discharge profile (constant vs. periodic burst such as burst peak current), operating temperature, humidity, the associated DC/DC converter, etc. that effect the battery life. According to one of our Japanese customers who also was in battery manufacturing business, while these batteries can tolerate peak currents of much higher than 5mA (e.g. the BLE chip from the company in Scandinavia, the one from the Cambridge based company that just changed hands, the one from the company from Texas, etc.), every time that you cross the 5mA threshold, you reduce the life of the battery. That is why less than 5mA peak current matters.

Our BLE solution will be offered using our SmartConnect framework and methodology, which black boxes the complexities associated with using wireless connectivity, and let the MCU programmers focus on their application development, not needing to become wireless connectivity experts to participate in the IoT market.

At Atmel, we are also known for our activities within the Maker community, particularly Arduino users. As a result, we have already started giving access to the Maker community to our wireless products using our Arduino Wi-Fi shield, which was released back in September 2014. Just imagine what kind of innovations can come from tinkerers, hobbyists and developers if you give them access to our BLE Arduino shield. Some of the IoT categories such as wearables, health and fitness, and portable medical electronics, among others, have already chosen BLE as their wireless connectivity of choice to communicate with the smartphones at their gateway of choice. I am sure the Maker community will come up with additional categories.

Atmel unveils a cloud-ready Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo platform for IoT apps

Atmel has expanded its SmartConnect wireless portfolio with a wireless combo system-on-chip (SoC) for the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) market.

The new fully-integrated WILC3000 wireless link controller combines Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth Smart-ready technologies in an ultra-small 4.1mm x 4.1mm Wafer Level Chip Scale Package (WLCSP) with lower power consumption, along with Atmel’s patented adaptive co-existence engine, making it the ideal solution for IoT and wearable applications. Atmel’s WILC3000 Wi-Fi solution offers multiple peripheral interfaces including UART, SPI, I2C, and SDIO, along with the associated cloud-ready connectivity software, making it the perfect wireless connectivity companion to any microprocessor (MPU) running Android or Linux MPUs.

Atmel is also introducing the WINC3400 network controller featuring embedded flash memory which allows the device to host network services stack, Wi-Fi stack, and Bluetooth Smart profiles for rapid design development with no wireless expertise required from the designer. The WINC3400 can be paired with any Atmel AVR® or Atmel | SMART MCUs.

“IoT requires a diverse portfolio of wireless MPUs and MCUs with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities that will enable cloud access,” said Kaivan Karimi, Atmel Vice President and General Manager of Wireless MCUs. “Adding cloud connectivity to devices in the industrial, medical, wearable, fitness and other consumer markets will require a combination of embedded Wi-Fi with Bluetooth optimized for low battery consumption, and support for out-of-the-box, cloud ready software. Atmel’s SmartConnect WILC3000 and WINC3400 address these requirements by delivering a compact cloud-ready Wi-Fi/Bluetooth-certified platform that helps bring customer products faster to market.”

The latest cloudy-ready Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo platform is optimized for low-power applications, supporting single-stream 802.11n mode providing up to 72 Mbps throughput, enabling a broad range of use cases. Both devices integrate a power amplifier, LNA, switch and power management unit providing developers with the highest level of integration together with the best link budget for maximum range. The WILC3000 and WINC3400 provide the highest integration for a lower bill of material. The only external clock sources required is a high-speed crystal or oscillator with a wide range of reference clock frequencies supported (14-40 MHz) and a 32.768 kHz clock for sleep operation.

The WINC 3400 network controller offers an On-Chip Network Stack to minimize host CPU requirements. The Network features include TCP, UDP, DHCP, ARP, HTTP, SSL, and DNS. Additionally, the WINC3400 SiP includes Bluetooth Smart profiles allowing connection to advanced low energy application such as smart energy, consumer wellness, home automation, security, proximity detection, entertainment, sports and fitness and automotive. This solution also supports Atmel’s cloud-ready software for simple cloud connectivity.

Ready to add some connectivity to your next design? Explore the entire SmartConnect wireless family here.

Atmel unveils an ultra-low power Bluetooth Smart solution for the IoT

Evident by the sheer volume of connected objects infiltrating our homes, offices, cars and nearly every facet of our life, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is set for explosive growth. With billions of devices expected to become network-enabled, designers of all levels will require a very low-power platform that allows them to develop these smart gadgets in space-constrained applications. Luckily now, there’s the BTLC1000.

The new ultra-low power Bluetooth Smart solution is capable of achieving sub-1µA in standby mode, while delivering the industry’s best dynamic power consumption and increasing battery life by as much as one year for certain applications. The BTLC1000 pushes the limits of space constrained areas with its unprecedented 2.1mm X 2.1mm Wafer Level Chipscale Package (WLCSP), making it ideal for the rapidly growing IoT and wearables spaces, including portable medical, activity trackers, human Interface devices, gaming controllers, beacons and much more.

Expanding upon the Atmel SmartConnect wireless portfolio, the BTLC1000 is a Bluetooth Smart link controller integrated circuit that connects as a companion to any Atmel AVR or Atmel | SMART MCU through a UART or SPI API requiring minimal resource on the host side. The standalone Atmel | SMART SAMB11 Bluetooth Smart Flash MCU leverages the embedded ARM Cortex-M0 core combined with the integrated analog and communication peripherals to implement application-specific functionalities and is available as a system-in-package or a certified module. Both devices are fully integrated with a self-contained Bluetooth Smart controller and stack enabling wireless connectivity for a variety of applications to be quickly implemented without the wireless expertise typically required.

“One of the primary challenges of the IoT market is system integration—connecting one or multiple devices to the gateway and cloud,” explained Reza Kazerounian, Atmel Senior Vice President and General Manager, MCU Business Unit. “Atmel’s new Bluetooth Smart solutions solve these integration issues by enabling IoT designers of all levels the ability to connect their devices to the gateway and cloud with an easy-to-use, low-power Bluetooth connectivity solution. We are excited to enable more designers to bring their connected devices to the IoT market without comprising design time.”

Bluetooth Smart devices are a new breed of Bluetooth 4.1 peripherals with only a single Bluetooth 4.1 radio connecting only to Bluetooth Smart Ready devices. For those unfamiliar with the technology, Bluetooth Smart is the intelligent, power-friendly version of Bluetooth wireless connectivity that works with an application on the smartphone or tablet you already own. In fact, Bluetooth Smart solutions set new low-power standards with at least 30% power savings compared to existing solutions on the market in dynamic mode.

The cost-effective Bluetooth Smart technology can easily provide developers and OEMs the flexibility to create solutions that will work with the billions of Bluetooth-enabled products already in the market today, not to mention is supported by every major operating system. The technology brings every day devices such as toothbrushes, heart-rate monitors, fitness devices and more to be connected, communicating through applications that reside in Bluetooth Smart compatible smartphones, tablets or other similar devices already owned by consumers.

Interested? General samples will be available in March.

Atmel and IoT and Crypto, oh my!

One of the companies that is best positioned to supply components into the Internet of Things (IoT) market is Atmel. For the time being most designs will be done using standard components, not doing massive integration on an SoC targeted at a specific market. The biggest issue in the early stage of market development will be working out what the customer wants and so the big premium will be on getting to market early and iterating fast, not premature cost optimization for a market that might not be big enough to support the design/NRE of a custom design.

Here is Atmel’s latest product in the SmartConnect family, the SAM W25 module

Atmel has microcontrollers, literally over 500 different flavors and in two families, the AVR family and a broad selection of ARM microcontrollers ad processors. They have wireless connectivity. They have strong solutions in security.

Indeed last week at Electronica in Germany they announced the latest product in the SmartConnect family, the SAM W25 module. It is the industry’s first fully-integrated FCC-certified Wi-Fi module with a standalone MCU and hardware security from a single source. The module is tiny, not much larger than a penny. The module includes Atmel’s recently-announced 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi WINC1500, along with an Atmel | SMART SAM D21 ARM Cortex M0+-based MCU and Atmel’s ATECC108A optimized CryptoAuthentication engine with ultra-secure hardware-based key storage for secure connectivity.

Atmel at Electronica 2014

That last item is a key component for many IoT designs. Security is going to be a big thing and with so many well-publicized breaches of software security, the algorithms, and particularly the keys, are moving quickly into hardware. That component, the ATECC108A, provides state-of-the-art hardware security including a full turnkey Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) engine using key sizes of 256 or 283 bits – appropriate for modern security environments without the long computation delay typical of software solutions. Access to the device is through a standard I²C Interface at speeds up to 1Mb/sec. It is compatible with standard Serial EEPROM I²C Interface specifications. Compared to software, the device is:

• Higher performance (faster encryption)
• Lower power
• Much harder to compromise

Atmel has a new white paper out, Integrating the Internet of Things, Necessary Building Blocks for Broad Market Adoption. Depending on whose numbers you believe, there will be 50 billion IoT edge devices connected by 2020.

Edge nodes are becoming integrated into everyone’s life

As it says in the white paper:

On first inspection, the requirements of an IoT edge device appear to be much the same as any other microcontroller (MCU) based development project. You have one or more sensors that are read by an MCU, the data may then be processed locally prior to sending it off to another application or causing another event to occur such as turning on a motor. However, there are decisions to be made regarding how to communicate with these other applications. Wired, wireless, and power line communication (PLC) are the usual options. But, then you have to consider that many IoT devices are going to be battery powered, which means that their power consumption needs to be kept as low as possible to prolong battery life. The complexities deepen when you consider the security implications of a connected device as well. And that’s not just security of data being transferred, but also ensuring your device can’t be cloned and that it does not allow unauthorized applications to run on it.

IoT design requirements: Software / development tools ecosystem

For almost any application, the building blocks for an IoT edge node are the same:

• Embedded processing
• Sensors
• Connectivity
• Security
• And while not really a “building block,” ultra-low power for always-on applications

My view is that the biggest of these issues will be security. After all, even though Atmel has hundreds of different microcontrollers and microprocessors, there are plenty of other suppliers. Same goes for connectivity solutions. But strong cryptographhic solutions implemented in hardware are much less common.

The new IoT white paper is available for download here.

This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Paul McLellan is a featured blogger. It first appeared there on November 19, 2014.

Atmel teams with ARM on IoT Development Platform

Atmel is joining forces with ARM on the mbed device platform for the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT).

This partnership broadens the ecosystem support for developers using Atmel’s portfolio of secure, low-power and cost-effective wireless connectivity solutions, specifically the Atmel SmartConnect Wi-Fi and 802.15.4-compliant solutions. Additionally, IoT developers for smart wearables, connected appliances, home automation systems and more can now bring their products faster to market.

Built around open standards, the mbed platform combines Internet protocols, security and standards-based manageability into one integrated system, and gathers silicon, cloud and device partners in one community. Atmel | SMART SAMR21 and WINC1500 customers now gain access to the mbed OS software platform, which includes command-line tools, a low-power HAL, as well as advanced networking protocols like 6LoWPAN and Thread to significantly accelerate IoT development.

“The ARM mbed IoT Device Platform simplifies the development and deployment of next-generation IoT devices and cloud services,” said Krisztian Flautner, ARM General Manager, IoT Business. “The integration of Atmel’s wireless technology with the mbed platform allows IoT developers to rapidly create devices that communicate across a mesh network with cloud services. This will drive the acceleration of the IoT in consumers and industrial markets.”

“As a leader in the IoT market, Atmel is committed to enabling developers of all levels the opportunity to bring their IoT devices quickly to market,” explained Steve Pancoast, Atmel Vice President of Software Applications, Tools and Development. “In this fragmented market place, we are leading the charge to bring easy-to-use hardware, software, development tools and platform solutions to market and enabling our IoT developers more time to focus on critical features in their design. By partnering with ARM on their mbed platform, we’ve taken another step towards making the 50 billion devices for the IoT market a reality.”

Those interested in learning more about the ARM mbed platform can head over to its official page here.

Preview: ARM TechCon 2014

Fresh on the heels of World Maker Faire, the Atmel team is headed down the road to the city of Santa Clara for the 10th Annual ARM TechCon 2014. Held October 1-3 inside the Santa Clara Convention Center, the Atmel team will showcase the latest Atmel | SMART ARM-based microcontrollers driving smart, secure and connected devices for the Internet of Things.

At the Atmel booth (#205), visitors will have a chance to explore a number of hands-on demos including:

• Atmel | SMART SAM D20 GPS Tracker
• Atmel | SMART SAM D21
• Narrative Clip powered by Atmel | SMART SAM9G25
• The newly-unveiled Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101
• Bosch Sensor Hub
• The recently-announced Atmel SmartConnect Wi-Fi modules 
• Crank featuring an Atmel | SMART MCU

…. and, we will also be making announcement around the Atmel | SMART MCU family which you will surely not want to miss. Stay tuned!

Anyone who’s previously attended ARM TechCon — or any event where Atmel was present for that matter– knows one of the highlights is the free giveaways! On Wednesday, we will be distributing several Atmel | SMART SAM4L Evaluation Kits from our booth (#205). Whereas on Thursday, Atmel | SMART SAM D20 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit will be given away during the ARM Connected Community demo at 1:30pm and 5:00pm PT inside the ARM booth (#300).

Meanwhile, Andreas Eieland, Atmel Senior Product Marketing Manager, will educating attendees on why ARM’s Cortex-M0+ was the ideal architecture to use as a foundation for the highly-flexible and easy-to-use SAM D MCU and its potential use cases in home automation, consumer devices, smart metering and industrial applications. Don’t this this session, aptly entitled “Think Beyond the Core,” which is slated to take place on Wednesday at 2:00pm PT.

Other notable key moments in and around the show include an infrastructure panel with Dell and Oracle moderated by ARM’s Ian Ferguson, discussions around the new Cortex-M7 processor, IoT and wearable tech-focused developer workshops, as well as Thursday’s keynote with ARM CEO Simon Segars.

Be prepared to be blown away by not one, but two keynote speakers: Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics, and Erica Kochi, Chief Innovator for UNICEF. Anderson will be discussing the latest developments in the drone community along with new opportunities in robotics for ARM, while Kochi will explore the ways in which UNICEF and ARM are working together on power and efficiency improvements for mobile devices.

Thinking of visiting the show? Receive a free ARM Expo Pass using the code: ARMExp100. Hurry, this promotion expires on September 30th.

Unable to attend? As a leading member of the ARM Connected Community, rest assured we will be tweeting away and dishing out up-to-the-minute happenings from the show floor. Follow along using the hashtags #ARMTechCon and #AtmelLive throughout the week.