Arm and silicon partners collaborate on IoT development through new Mbed OS Partner Governance model

By Chris Porthouse, vice president of product and operations, IoT Services Group, Arm

October 8, 2019 -- For nearly 30 years the Arm ecosystem of more than 1,000 partners collaborated thanks to an underlying shared success model to deliver more than 150 billion chips. This ecosystem has been described as the oxygen that fuels this collective engagement and makes development as simple as breathing.

When it comes to solving the challenges in developing and deploying the Internet of Things (IoT), the Arm ecosystem model has never been more applicable, as IoT takes a village to be successful and a single company cannot do it alone. Thus far, our ecosystem model has resulted in billions of IoT devices powered by Arm-based chips from hundreds of our partners having shipped. And to simplify IoT for developers, during the past ten years we have built a vast ecosystem around our free, open-source IoT operating system, Mbed OS, which includes more than 425,000 third party software developers and more than 150 Mbed-enabled boards and modules.

Collaboratively shaping the future of Mbed OS

As the market expands to hundreds of billions and ultimately a trillion connected devices, our ecosystem model will only be successful if our partners can continue to collaborate and differentiate. That’s why today we’re announcing our new Mbed OS Partner Governance model, based on direct feedback from our silicon provider partners. This is an important step towards fueling increased innovation and differentiation within our IoT ecosystem. Through this model, we are empowering our silicon partners with the ability to help shape and determine the future direction of Mbed OS, while still maintaining our strong commercial leadership and backing that we have provided over the years.

While Mbed OS has always been an open-source IoT operating system, we are shifting its governance so that our silicon partners can directly influence future development and enhance our efforts in building out new capabilities, features and functionality, which are critical in scaling to a trillion connected devices. One new mechanism for enabling this is the establishment of monthly Product Working Group meetings where, together with our silicon partners, we will prioritize and vote on which new capabilities will be added to Mbed OS. Any Mbed Silicon Partner Program member is welcome to join at no cost. Several of our silicon partners including Analog Devices, Cypress, Maxim Integrated, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Realtek, Samsung, Silicon Labs and u-blox are already actively participating in the working group.

Unique approach to partner governance

Our new governance approach is unique in that we are offering a collaborative approach with our partners in implementing new product capabilities, whereas most commercial IoT OSes are often developed by a single vendor without a clear model on how hardware partners can contribute. The outcomes of the Product Working Group discussions will ultimately benefit our broader IoT ecosystem. For example, we are working on new low-power battery optimization based on initial contributions from our partners, which will extend the battery life of devices out in the field.

Come join us in building out the future direction of Mbed OS and let’s work together to make IoT simple, secure and scalable to deploy.

Supplemental Quote Sheet:

“As the world’s leading open-sourced hardware and software solution providers for IoT, we have a long-standing relationship working with Arm to integrate our development boards with Mbed OS and their Pelion IoT platform,” said Fabio Violante, CE0, Arduino. “This shift in Mbed governance will be critical in continuing to enable the silicon providers to differentiate their microcontrollers that are used throughout our Arduino boards.”

“Cypress believes that IoT privacy inherently depends upon hardware-based security provided by chips used in edge devices,” said Jack Ogawa, Senior Director of Marketing, Cypress. “Through the shift in Mbed governance, we aim to work with Arm to make it easier to use Cypress’ PSA-certified Secure MCUs and Wi-Fi devices to implement features such as WPA2 Enterprise Security.”

“The generic MCU business market is moving vendors to rapidly develop secure microcontrollers that take on a variety of form factors together with secure operating systems for the evolving IoT landscape,” said Jason Lin, Vice President of Microcontroller Application Business Group, Nuvoton. “Mbed OS provides the full-stack of features and tools that we need to develop secure IoT platforms based on M0, M23, and M4 MCU products. The move to open governance will continue to spur innovation on the key features and capabilities that our customers are requesting.”

“We are excited to be part of this shift in governance structure, and are actively participating in the Mbed product working groups, both technical and marketing,” says Rob Oshana, Vice President of Software R&D at NXP. “Our collective efforts with Arm and the other members of the Mbed governing body further solidifies the active development of this important open source initiative and drives technical innovation at the core.”

"Having just launched our new Renesas Advanced (RA) Family of Cortex-M MCUs, we fully embrace the open collaboration across the Arm ecosystem. The new Arm Mbed OS Partner Governance model gives Renesas greater opportunity to determine necessary features in order to future proof our offering, which implements end-to-end IoT security through this open collaboration with other partners,” said Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Marketing, IoT Platform Business Division at Renesas. “In addition, we believe there are tangible benefits in working with Arm that will greatly benefit our ability to meet customer needs, and to contribute tremendous benefits to everyone in the Arm ecosystem."

“We recently joined the Mbed ecosystem to expand our global IoT chipset footprint, given its flexibility and ease of use,” said Ben Hur, senior vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Mbed OS provides the functionality for Samsung Exynos i processors to securely develop at scale, and by participating in the Mbed Governance Product Working Groups we will help bring new, exciting capabilities to the forefront.”

About Arm

Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and connectivity revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our advanced, energy-efficient processor designs have enabled intelligent computing in more than 150 billion chips and our technologies now securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. In combination with our IoT device, connectivity and data management platform, we are also enabling customers with powerful and actionable business insights that are generating new value from their connected devices and data. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of compute from the chip to the cloud.