ARM Announces Device Platform and Free OS to Accelerate Internet of Things Deployment

The mbed IoT Device Platform includes the following elements:

• mbed OS: a free operating system for ARM Cortex^®-M processor based devices that consolidates the fundamental building blocks of the IoT in one integrated set of software components. It contains security, communication and device management features to enable the development of production-grade, energy-efficient IoT devices. It is available to mbed partners in Q4 2014 for early development, with the first production devices due in 2015. Key benefits:
• Enables companies to focus on innovation and differentiation, reducing development costs and time to market
• Free for developers and for deployment, supported by an ecosystem of more than100 OEMs and major chip vendors
• Increases developer productivity by enabling software component reuse for shorter development cycles
• Support for key standards such as Bluetooth^® Smart, 2G, 3G, LTE and CDMA cellular technologies, Thread, Wi-Fi^®, and 802.15.4/6LoWPAN along with TLS/DTLS, CoAP, HTTP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M.

mbed Device Server: a licensable software product that provides the required server-side technologies to connect and manage devices in a secure way. It also provides a bridge between the protocols designed for use on IoT devices and the APIs that are used by web developers. This simplifies the integration of IoT devices that provide “little data” into cloud frameworks that deploy “big data” analytics on the aggregated information. Built around open standards, the product scales to handle the connections and management of millions of devices. mbed Device Server is available now. Key benefits:

• Improves efficiency, security and manageability for devices utilizing a standards-based and IoT-optimized approach
• Reduces the complexity of integrating IoT capabilities into existing cloud services
• Unifies device and application data management using the same technology foundation and eliminating the need for duplicate infrastructure for clients and servers
• Provides access to a large unified market of devices through open standards and the widely-deployed ARM partner ecosystem.

• mbed.org: the focus point for a community of more than 70,000 developers around mbed. The website provides a comprehensive database of hardware development kits, a repository for reusable software components, reference applications, documentation and web-based development tools. It is already well-established:
• 1,000,000 project builds last year
• More than 30 official boards
• Eight years of IoT server and 6LowPan products
• Five years of 24/7 cloud service operation
• More than 9000 published projects.

“Deploying IoT-enabled products and services requires a diverse set of technologies and skills to be coordinated across an organization,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM. “ARM mbed will make this easier by offering the necessary building blocks to enable our expanding set of ecosystem partners to focus on the problems they need to solve to differentiate their products, instead of common infrastructure technologies. This will accelerate the growth and adoption of the IoT in all sectors of the global economy.”

The mbed partner ecosystem has been expanded to enable participation by a wide range of silicon, module, original equipment manufacturer (OEM), system integrator, cloud and operator partners. Launch partners for the mbed IoT Device Platform include Atmel, CSR, Ericsson, Farnell, Freescale, IBM, KDDI, Marvell, MegaChips, MultiTech, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Renesas, SeeControl, Semtech, Silicon Labs, Stream Technologies, ST, Telenor Connexion, Telefonica, Thundersoft, u-blox, wot.io and Zebra.

“Today’s IoT devices largely exist in isolation and it has been impossible to realize a truly interconnected world where devices are interoperable with many different cloud services,” said Krisztian Flautner, general manager, IoT business, ARM. “The ARM mbed IoT Device Platform will solve this by providing a common communication and management toolkit that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. We expect mbed to significantly speed up the large scale deployment of a new breed of both IoT devices and cloud services.”