Companies team up to shorten IoT node design cycle
Global semiconductor company, STMicroelectronics, has announced its cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm and business unit of Alibaba Group, to provide a complete cloud-to-node IoT solution to the market. The cooperation will allow any designer to easily create IoT nodes and gateways using ST's key semiconductor building blocks for the IoT, run Alibaba's IoT operating system AliOS on the node, and seamlessly connect with the Alibaba Cloud for faster time-to-market of large-volume IoT applications.
With the official release of AliOS, ST has made the AliOS available to run on its robust STM32 microcontroller (MCU) platform, the market's broadest Arm Cortex-M MCU portfolio and a leading choice for Chinese IoT designers. Beyond processing, designers will get access to ST's complete portfolio covering all the key building blocks for the IoT, including connectivity, security, sensors, power management, and signal conditioning. ST's modular and interoperable IoT development platform spans state-of-the-art semiconductor components, ready-to-use development boards, free software tools, and common application examples.
The ST/Alibaba collaboration assures development efficiency and access to the first Chinese IoT turnkey platform, bringing greater convenience and productivity to developers when creating IoT nodes and to integrators when connecting to the Alibaba Cloud. Customers also get a head-start on time-to-market with AliOS's pre-validation of all software components on the platform, easing security provisions and field device upgrades.
"By collaborating with Alibaba, we can provide developers in China with the STM32 platform to build IoT nodes running AliOS. This gives customers a head-start to using the combination of AliOS Node-to-Cloud complete vertical solution and the broad portfolio of ST's IoT technologies that includes sensors, processing, security, connectivity, and power," said Arnaud Julienne, Vice President, Microcontroller, Memory, and Secure MCU & IoT, Asia Pacific Region, STMicroelectronics.
"Alibaba, a rich and powerful platform for everyone to conduct business, will help different IoT market players, both large and medium/small businesses, to find their customers or vendors. Alibaba is cooperating with ST to build joint solutions from Cloud to Node, to include security in applications, and we definitely believe AliOS and ST chipsets can help customers achieve their targets in the IoT mass-market," said Ku Wei, General Manager of IOT BU of Ali Cloud BG.