ARM Expands Its IoT Development Platform

ARM has unveiled a selection of products aimed at helping businesses develop and produce safe and secure devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).

The British chipmaker has revealed a range of new offerings in its ARM mbed IoT Device Platform, including a free service that businesses can use to connect and securely manage IoT devices as well as an updated version of its modular IoT operating system.

There are also new reference designs for wearables and smart city products, as ARM looks to give developers and partners the tools to create new connected products.

Growing

ARM says that its new wearable reference design will allow new wrist-mounted connected devices that are able to provide “a fully interactive user-experience”, and also deliver a long-lasting battery life of around eight weeks.

The Smart City reference design is aimed at infrastructure monitoring and smart industrial applications that look after a large number of connected devices, allowing for the quick deployment, configuration and management of routers and end devices in industrial applications that will reduce the bill of materials for end devices.

“ARM mbed partners now have access to the fundamental building blocks to develop and securely deploy IoT devices at any scale,” said Krisztian Flautner, general manager, IoT business, ARM. “Since the launch of the mbed IoT Device Platform last year, we have focused our efforts on providing the mbed Partnership with the tools to scale deployments from a single cloud-connected sensor to a host of more intricate devices that enterprise-grade IoT solutions demand.”

These other new tools include the mbed Device Connector, which provides security and development benefits including the ability to connect devices within prototype deployments, hopefully shortening the time needed to carry out hardware design time. The service, which is free to use on up to 100 devices and is able to handle up to 10,000 events per hour, will allow developers to create secure web applications quickly and easily integrate them with existing cloud platforms.

The other new announcement concerns the latest version of ARM’s modular operating system to develop and create scalable IoT devices. The mbed OS Technology Preview will also allow developers to implement some of ARM’s latest breakthrough products, including mbed TLS, the first native OS support for Thread and basic manageability of devices.

ARM has long been a major player in the IoT space, and recently announced it would be teaming up with IBM to help allow analytics devices to deal with large amounts of fast-moving data from IoT devices, with industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable devices all mooted as ideal applications.

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