How Can IoT Development Accelerate Time-to-Market?

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the past two years is evident to industry professionals. However, as development accelerates, the difficulty of developing new devices also increases significantly. How can we achieve the best development experience while maintaining security and low power consumption, and reduce time-to-market?

To excel in a task, one must first sharpen their tools. A good platform is a “godsend” for IoT development and design. From the trends in the electronics industry, “integration and end-to-end” solutions have always been effective methods for reducing power consumption and costs. Development platforms also need further integration and consolidation to provide a more streamlined development process.

Simplifying the development process not only accelerates time-to-market and reduces development costs, but also allows developers to focus on optimizing functionalities in areas where they excel. On the other hand, an integrated platform can better match various parameters of the entire system, making it easier to configure corresponding security features, ultimately ensuring the safety and stability of the final product.

In fact, Cypress provides such a platform, offering a complete set of IoT development tools from hardware, software, community to ecosystem. This is IoT-AdvantEdge, which can accelerate time-to-market using this platform.

Specifically, accelerating time-to-market relies on the platform’s multi-functionality and ease of use, which can lead to lower development and learning costs. Furthermore, IoT-AdvantEdge is end-to-end, highly secure, and low power consumption. In a few words, it can be summarized as “fast, good, and economical.”

Integrated Platform

IoT-AdvantEdge itself is a highly integrated platform, composed of PSoC chips, the ModusToolbox development toolchain, development tools and support, and collaboration with ecosystem partners. It is this coupling and support among various components that enables the acceleration of time-to-market.

IoT-AdvantEdge enhances edge computing and connectivity, aiding integration with leading cloud service providers in the industry. With IoT-AdvantEdge, required functionalities can be designed into developers’ smart IoT edge devices, enabling the implementation of machine learning and local decision-making.

● From the hardware perspective:PSoC 6 series MCUs are products specifically launched for the IoT market, utilizing a dual-core architecture of Arm Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M0+. They employ a 40nm SONOS process, with working currents as low as 22 A/MHz for Cortex-M4 and 15 A/MHz for Cortex-M0+. While in operation, Cortex-M4 handles high-performance application processing tasks, and Cortex-M0 is used for low-power processing tasks, balancing performance and power consumption. This switching makes it highly suitable for distributed IoT applications and can also reduce the BOM cost of the system. Additionally, the PSoC 6 series has launched the PSoC 6 Secure MCU, which focuses on IoT security and integrates multiple security features.

● From the software perspective:ModusToolbox development tools are also a highly integrated development toolchain. ModusToolbox combines top-notch IoT connectivity, processing, sensing, and security features. Furthermore, the development tools include low-power assistants, multi-RF coexistence, security certification, and OTA upgrades, significantly reducing the time and cost required to bring high-quality products to market.

● From the community perspective:Everyone inevitably encounters problems during design, and the community serves as the strongest shield to reduce the time to resolve issues. This is the complete platform provided by Cypress for engineers to learn, share, and discover new knowledge. Cypress engineers passionately support the IoT developer community and clients, helping them tackle challenges encountered during the creation of IoT products, thereby making the entire platform easier to learn and use.

● From the ecosystem perspective:On one hand, it provides a one-stop development ecosystem in both software and hardware, ensuring seamless integration; on the other hand, it offers a broad ecosystem collaboration through a rich supply chain, providing developers with abundant tools and pre-integrated services from cloud service providers, specialized semiconductor products, application developers, and various ecosystem partners, thus enriching development resources and reducing development difficulty.

Since so many functions are integrated, what problems can this platform solve? According to the introduction, IoT-AdvantEdge can address multiple IoT pain points, including connectivity, security, HMI, low power consumption, ease of use, integration, cloud, and profitability. Among these, connectivity, computation, and creation are the platform’s greatest advantages.

It is worth mentioning that IoT-AdvantEdge can strengthen edge computing and connectivity, assisting integration with leading cloud service providers in the industry. With IoT-AdvantEdge, required functionalities can be designed into smart IoT edge devices, enabling the implementation of machine learning and local decision-making.

Integrated Security

Utilizing integrated security features can also effectively shorten time-to-market, as security development inherently involves certain design time costs and security standards. By integrating multiple security configurations and platforms, developers can save time on security design without needing to separately configure external security components and systems within products that have limited size and power consumption.

IoT security has been a key emphasized concept since the inception of IoT technology, controlling security from edge to cloud. Some regions and countries have mandated that IoT devices include built-in security features. Today, IoT manufacturers face the challenge of designing high-standard security measures within resource-constrained products.

Modern IoT devices must not only meet various requirements for power consumption, price, and processing, but also achieve the same strict Class A processor-level security as PCs, smartphones, and cars.

How can we achieve internet-level high-standard security in cloud-connected IoT edge devices while shortening time-to-market? The answer lies in adopting secure microcontrollers, specifically the PSoC 64 Secure Microcontroller from Cypress.

PSoC 64 is part of the IoT-AdvantEdge solution, which is a comprehensive set of building blocks that can help IoT products enter the market faster and at a lower cost. IoT-AdvantEdge combines reliable connectivity with security and local processing capabilities in the form of an integrated solution, simplifying the design experience.

The PSoC 64 Secure Microcontroller is also an integrated solution, containing Trusted Firmware-M for embedded security, Arm Mbed IoT OS, and Arm Pelion IoT platform, making it the first product to integrate these functionalities. Notably, this solution has received PSA Level 1 certification, showcasing the industry’s best security practices.

From a technical perspective, the features integrated into PSoC 64 possess the following characteristics to help developers complete designs faster:

● Trusted Firmware-M:This open-source software provides configurable components that implement PSA Functional API and create a “Secure Processing Environment (SPE)” for Arm Cortex-M based microcontrollers. By using the PSoC 64 trust root, IoT device manufacturers can more easily have their final products pass PSA certification.

How Can IoT Development Accelerate Time-to-Market?

● Mbed IoT OS:This is a free, open-source operating system specifically designed for low-power IoT devices, offering a rich software solution including BLE, IEEE 802.15.4, 6LowPAN, Thread, driver frameworks, and RTOS. The characteristics of PSoC 64 itself align well with its application areas.

Additionally, this ensures that ModusToolbox can fully adapt to various real-time operating systems (RTOS), be compatible with open-source systems, and various cloud ecosystems. All development tools and processes can be used on hosts running Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. Developers can experience Mbed through Mbed CLI tools, online editors, Mbed Studio, or by exporting to the ModusToolbox integrated design environment (IDE).

How Can IoT Development Accelerate Time-to-Market?

● Pelion Platform:This IoT platform is divided into four parts: connectivity management, device management, data management, and ecosystem management. It offers design and connectivity flexibility, supporting various device types from IP to non-IP connections, and from constrained to high-bandwidth networks, while providing continuous firmware updates for these devices remotely.

Through Pelion’s device management, secure device management can be achieved at every stage of the product lifecycle, from product supply to service operation, to decommissioning of products. PSoC 64 employs a dual-core architecture, with the Arm Cortex-M4 core responsible for running applications, while the Arm Cortex-M0+ core serves as a security co-processor with a pre-configured trust root.

How Can IoT Development Accelerate Time-to-Market?

Charlene Marini, Vice President and General Manager of Arm’s IoT Platform Devices, stated: “OEM manufacturers and enterprises need to rely on flexible solutions to help them quickly, securely develop, deploy, and manage IoT devices based on a trusted root of security. By integrating Arm-based PSoC 64 Secure MCU, Pelion device management, Mbed OS, and PSA Level 1 certified Trusted Firmware-M, this solution can provide OEM manufacturers with IoT security across the entire value chain from chip to cloud.”

Additionally, the PSoC 64, as a security-focused MCU, also features hardware trust root, secure boot, firmware updates, hardware-based TLS, authentication secure key storage, field configuration, and separation of secure and non-secure processing, equipped with the PSoC 64 standard security AWS solutions, which have been supported by a rigorous Amazon certification process.

After acquiring Cypress Semiconductor, the PSoC 64 Secure Microcontroller product line has now become part of Infineon’s comprehensive semiconductor product portfolio for automotive, industrial, and IoT markets.

Integrated Software

ModusToolbox is a development kit launched by Cypress last year and is part of the IoT-AdvantEdge solution. Through highly integrated software, development documentation, community, and ecosystem, it helps developers develop easily and quickly, accelerating time-to-market.

The kit has now released version 2.2, which can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. It has support for tools such as RTOS, IDE editors, compilers, debuggers, HAL/PDL, configurators, driver stacks, libraries, and cloud.

The latest ModusToolbox 2.2 update adds support for shared libraries, GUI improvements for the project creator tool, enhanced access to chip internal analog circuit configuration design for on-chip simulation routing, updates to programmers/debuggers, and a new version upgrade of the GNU C compiler, making the development process even more streamlined and speeding up time-to-market.

It is worth mentioning that ModusToolbox itself places a strong emphasis on open source, whether in supporting Mbed OS or in the context of Linux/Android, open source can definitely acquire more resource support and development advantages. Although there are many open-source options, Cypress continues to enhance the security of Linux and Android software.

Furthermore, Cypress will soon release Linux and Android software artifacts on GitHub rather than in tarball format, to further simplify usage and adoption.

According to user feedback, in the Cypress/Element14 “Connected Cloud Challenge”, the winning participant expressed their experience using the PSoC 6 MCU + ModusToolbox software. The participant stated that compared to other solutions on the market, the design experience using Cypress ModusToolbox was excellent. “Compared to the software development experience of other solutions on the market, I can say that the experience is 100% positive. What I appreciate most is the comprehensive support provided by the documentation and the consistency reflected in the documentation and examples.”

In fact, more and more products on the market are starting to integrate into a single platform, reducing the time spent switching and ensuring compatibility between different tools.Meanwhile, Cypress continues to launch validated reference designs and ready-made solutions, further shortening the time developers face repetitive or challenging issues. Additionally, leveraging reference designs and ready-made solutions can enhance system security and stability, thus reducing worries.

Of course, some may ask, since everything is readily available, will it diminish the value of developers? The answer is actually the opposite; rather, efficient tools can better reflect the value of developers. In many cases, developers’ ideas can get lost in repetitive work, debugging, tool switching, and environment setup, which is why all semiconductor companies strive to simplify their platform product development. From a company perspective, simple and fast development translates to faster time-to-market and lower development costs.

Integration Has the Magic to Accelerate Time-to-Market

This author has attended dozens of press conferences and interviews related to semiconductor companies this year, and during each soul-searching question, the topic of integration was discussed. Most interviewees would unhesitatingly state that integration is a trend in the industry, which can not only reduce design time but also enhance the overall reliability of systems.

The author believes that having a complete set of products under the same hardware and software architecture can maximize the performance of devices, making them more adaptable, ultimately reflecting faster time-to-market and lower total cost of ownership in the products.

From the perspective of Cypress’s platform, IoT-AdvantEdge is not merely a simple assembly of products; it encompasses usability, multifunctionality, relevance, security, low power consumption, and low cost. This is due to the normalization of each individual part of the platform, which adheres to its positioning of accelerating time-to-market in IoT, thereby amplifying the final effect. Developers can achieve rapid development while still obtaining high security, low power consumption, and low costs.

On the other hand, since Cypress was acquired by Infineon, product releases targeting IoT-AdvantEdge have become increasingly frequent. This indicates that after absorbing Cypress, isolated products have gradually transformed into a complete and efficient development platform, demonstrating Infineon’s determination in the IoT market.

It is evident that in the trend of integration, mastering this opportunity is crucial to gaining a market advantage. Recognizing this trend, Cypress is leveraging integration to accelerate IoT design and address current IoT design challenges.

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