Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IoT chip design issues with Jeff Miller, product marketing manager for electronic design systems in the Deep Submicron Division of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Mike Eftimakis, IoT product manager in ARM‘s Systems and Software Group; and John Tinson, vice president of sales at Sondrel Ltd. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
SE: There are three conflicting challenges with the IoT. First, the cost needs to come down, particularly for edge devices. Second, these devices need to be semi-customized or fully customized for different markets. And third, there needs to be more pre-processing in devices to limit the amount of data being moved around. How do we resolve these competing demands?
Eftimakis: What we’ve been trying to do is to introduce simpler processing on the edge nodes and to make that easily affordable to SoC design teams. We’re trying to make it easier to design these devices by pre-assembling the different elements in systems, which are ready-to-use and easier to customize. This also includes security, because security is an increasingly important area of IoT. We have migrated TrustZone technology from the mobile world to the IoT. We have extended that to the subsystem, making it easier to use in a subsystem context. All of this is designed to make life easier for IoT design teams. It’s a better way than to design something from scratch, assembling small bits of IP.