Arm transforms the economics of IoT with Virtual Hardware and a new solutions-led offering

Cambridge, UK, October 18, 2021 – Arm today unveiled Arm^® Total Solutions for IoT, a unique approach to Internet of Things (IoT) design that will lay the foundation for a new IoT economy. Arm Total Solutions for IoT will simplify and modernize software development, resulting in accelerated time to market for developers, OEMs and service providers at all stages of the IoT value chain and a reduction in product design cycles by up to two years.

“Through a radical change in how systems are designed, Arm is uniquely positioned to fuel a new IoT economy that rivals the shape, speed and size of the smartphone industry’s app economy,” said Mohamed Awad, vice president of IoT and Embedded at Arm. “Arm Total Solutions for IoT changes the way we’re delivering key technology to the entire ecosystem and demonstrates our significant and ongoing investment in the software that will empower developers to innovate for global impact.”

New Virtual Hardware Targets will reduce product design cycles by up to two years
Built on the proven foundations of Arm Corstone^™, a validated and integrated subsystem that has accelerated time to market for more than 150 designs from Arm silicon partners, Arm Total Solutions for IoT introduces Arm Virtual Hardware Targets for software developers, OEMs and service providers. This new cloud-based offering delivers a virtual model of the Corstone subsystem to enable software development without the need for physical silicon. Arm Virtual Hardware brings modern agile software development methodologies like continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD), DevOps and MLOps to IoT and embedded platforms, without having to invest in complex hardware farms.

With accurate models of Arm-based SoCs providing mechanisms for simulating memory, peripherals and more, development and testing of software is now possible before silicon availability. This ultimately reduces a typical product design cycle from an average of five years to as little as three years. It allows Arm silicon partners to gain customer feedback for chips before tape out, while enabling the entire IoT value chain to easily develop and test code on the latest IP well ahead of silicon availability.

Arm Virtual Hardware is available on AWS Marketplace and Arm partners are already using it to innovate faster and accelerate their time to market.

Designing with use-cases in mind to simplify development
Arm Total Solutions for IoT provides a complete solution designed for specific use-cases, leaving developers to focus on what really matters – innovation and differentiation across diverse applications and devices. It has everything needed to simplify the design process and streamline product development, including hardware IP, software, machine learning (ML) models, advanced tools such as the new Virtual Hardware Targets, application specific reference code and support from the world’s largest IoT ecosystem.

The first configuration of an Arm Total Solution for IoT is available now and addresses general-purpose compute and ML workload use-cases, including an ML-based keyword recognition example. Available today are Virtual Hardware Targets for multiple configurations of the Arm Corstone-300 subsystem from Arm SoC partners, incorporating the Arm Cortex^®-M55 processor and Arm Ethos^™-U55 microNPU. You can read more detail here.

Arm is fully committed to this comprehensive solutions approach, with a robust roadmap of future solutions which will cover applications such as voice recognition and object recognition.

Standardization is critical for scale
To allow industry players to leverage the software and services they invest in across the widest possible range of platforms, Arm is also introducing Project Centauri. Project Centauri aims to achieve for the extensive Arm Cortex-M software ecosystem what Project Cassini does for the Cortex-A ecosystem, by delivering a set of device and platform standards, as well as reference implementations for device boot, security and cloud integration.

The Project Centauri APIs include support for PSA Certified and Open-CMSIS-CDI, a standard cloud-to-device specification that minimizes the effort required to enable different cloud solutions and real-time operating systems. This will reduce engineering costs, accelerate time to market, enable IoT deployments at scale and improve security across the Cortex-M ecosystem.

Leading the ecosystem into a new era for IoT
To date, Arm partners have shipped more than 70bn Arm Cortex-M based devices and show no sign of slowing, as chips for IoT are expected to have an average Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of nearly 15 percent through 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence. To address this growth opportunity, Arm is focused on ensuring its ecosystem is at the forefront of accelerating IoT innovation by making Arm IP increasingly accessible to innovative companies of all sizes through Arm Total Solutions for IoT and programs like Arm Flexible Access.

This represents the beginning of a new era for IoT – one of true software and hardware system-level co-design. Arm is uniquely positioned to unite software and hardware developers to create purpose-built compute and unleash the economic benefit of the IoT. From the smartphone to the data center – and now IoT – designing with systems in mind is the key to accelerating innovation and getting the best out of the specialized processing capabilities that the Arm ecosystem is delivering, wherever computing happens.

To learn more about Arm Virtual Hardware, Project Centauri and other Arm IoT developer initiatives, register to attend this week’s Arm DevSummit at devsummit.arm.com. Registration is free.


Supporting Partner Quotes

Alif
“At Alif Semiconductor, our aim is to provide developers with next-generation secure IoT solutions that deliver efficient AI/ML and long battery life. Arm Virtual Hardware is an innovative approach that enables our customers and software partners to iteratively train and fine-tune AI models in the cloud, receive ideal compute cycle counts for our particular SoC system configuration, and compare those to actual cycle counts measured on our silicon. This new approach will help developers save time and optimize their designs.” - Mark Rootz, Senior Marketing Director, Alif Semiconductor

Arduino
“Arm Total Solutions for IoT has the potential to unleash even more creativity in the global developer community, driving the type of innovation that we at Arduino are so passionate about. By simplifying and accelerating development, reducing fragmentation and empowering developers to create new products quickly and efficiently, Arm and its ecosystem is enabling the next wave of innovation in IoT, where new levels of ROI can be realized.” - Fabio Violante, CEO, Arduino

Deeplite.ai
“Realizing the potential of machine learning in IoT requires Deep Neural Networks as fast, small and low power as possible. Arm Virtual Hardware will enable Deeplite’s engine to create even more performant and energy efficient AI models that will enable developers to push the boundaries as they design for use cases across all market verticals.” - Davis Sawyer, Co-Founder & CPO, Deeplite.ai

DSP Concepts
“The potential for audio innovation in IoT applications, particularly through the use of Machine Learning, is huge. Arm Virtual Hardware has enabled us to start porting and optimizing for new Arm processors much earlier in the development cycle, and we believe that Arm Total Solutions for IoT will accelerate time-to-market for our customers, and time-to-experience for end users with life-changing features such as adaptive noise interference cancellation, sound event recognition, and acoustic scene adaptation.” - Paul Beckman, Founder and CTO, DSP Concepts

Edge Impulse
“Arm's Virtual Hardware is bringing new groundbreaking capabilities to the embedded space. Combined with Edge Impulse's modern approach to embedded ML, we pave the path for new innovations, never seen before.” - Zach Shelby, Co-Founder & CEO, Edge Impulse

Himax
“Himax always-on smart sensing products provide cutting-edge AI computing capability while keeping low power consumption, low bandwidth requirement and privacy at the same time. Our collaboration with the Arm edge AI ecosystem can fulfill all these requirements and empower us to deliver the market leading features of the Himax WiseEye solution, for which we embraced the Arm Total Solutions for IoT approach in development. By leveraging Arm Virtual Hardware Targets we enabled internal software development and our ecosystem developers ahead of silicon availability, significantly reducing time to market.” - Mark Chen, VP R&D, Himax

L2S2
“The L2S2 Managed Medical Device Cloud (MMDC) is designed to overcome barriers to health tech development and deployment and provide tools for ultra-rapid hardware and software development. Arm Virtual Hardware is a truly exciting addition to the market because it enables device data systems to be stress-tested before the device hardware is completed by simulating large scale deployments eliminating system failures that could delay clinical trials and regulatory approval.” - Philip Gaffney, CEO, L2S2

Linaro
“Linaro has been working closely with Arm on technologies such as Trusted Firmware, MCUboot and OpenCMSIS-pack to develop thoroughly tested, secure foundations for AI-enabled IoT devices. We welcome today’s announcement as we believe Arm Total Solutions for IoT will increase developer innovation and further accelerate the deployment of powerful and secure Arm-based IoT devices.” - Andrea Gallo, VP of Business Development, Linaro

Qeexo
“Systems Engineers require machine learning to create actionable insights from sensor data for a range of emerging IoT applications. The combination of Arm's Virtual Hardware Targets and Qeexo AutoML will give engineers access to much earlier performance estimation, design exploration, and optimizations fundamental to achieving high performance ML on Arm-based processors.” - Elias Fallon, director of ML, Qeexo

Sondrel
“Sondrel and Arm have been partners for almost 20 years: we were the first member of the Arm Approved Design Partner program. Arm Corstone gives us access to pre-integrated and validated IP components that simplify and accelerate our delivery of end-to-end silicon services at lower cost, and now Arm Total Solutions for IoT brings new capabilities through Arm Virtual Hardware, enabling our customers to start their software development and integration work before silicon availability.” - Graham Curren, CEO, Sondrel

TensorFlow Mobile
“The power of Machine Learning will be key to the development of future IoT applications. Arm Virtual Hardware has allowed us to develop and test our library for the new Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55, enabling us to support these new processors well ahead of silicon availability and giving developers the freedom to access these technologies much earlier in their product design.” - Pete Warden, Tech Lead, TensorFlow Mobile

About Arm

Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and data revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 200 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of AI-enhanced connected compute from the chip to the cloud.

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