Atmel has inked a deal with Sensinode to license the latter company’s 6LoWPAN software stack. According to Magnus Pedersen, Director of Wireless Solutions at Atmel, 6LoWPAN will facilitate the rapid development of smart, connected wireless devices that help make up The Internet of Things (IoT).
“Teaming with Sensinode is another key step Atmel has taken to ensure designers can quickly bring their smart, connected devices faster to market,” said Pedersen. “With this license agreement, designers now have all the necessary hardware and software elements at their fingertips to build products that require connectivity for the IoT.”
As noted above, Sensinode is licensing its 6LoWPAN stack and router solutions, the NanoStack 2.0 and NanoRouter 3.0 – all to be paired with Atmel’s ultra-low-power wireless hardware platforms for the design of power-efficient IPv6-based embedded wireless products.
Specifically, Sensinode’s NanoStack 2.0 will be used with Atmel’s ATmega256RFR2 wireless MCU, while the NanoRouter 3.0 is slated to support Atmel’s SAM4E Cortex-M4 flash-based MCU and AT86RF231 or AT86RF233 ultra low power IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceivers.
As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the Internet of Things is a rapidly evolving and growing market. Indeed, there are nearly 10 billion devices connected to the Internet – a figure expected to neatly triple when it hits approximately 30 billion devices by 2020.
“The IoT represents perhaps the greatest potential growth market for semiconductors over the next several years. What people want is WiFi capability along with very low power, because most of these smart devices are battery-powered,” Atmel President and CEO Steve Laub told the Wall Street Transcript during a recent interview.
“This is advantageous [for] Atmel, because we have both ultra low-power WiFi capability, and the microcontroller device, which when combined with WiFi, makes these devices intelligent and connected. This is a great opportunity for us, and we are very excited by the potential future growth of this technology and its business for us.”
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