IoT Takes Center Stage at Embedded World 2015

Last week, more than 900 exhibitors and 25,000 visitors gathered in Nuremburg, Germany at Embedded World 2015 to discuss, debate and share insights and solutions on the current trends and future challenges for embedded system technologies. Spansion was very excited to be a part of the show, presenting two different sessions and exhibiting on the show floor. Speaking of the show floor, one big takeaway from every conversation I had at the booths I visited: IoT continues to drive the embedded market.

The entire show kicked off with a keynote from Silicon Labs’ CEO Tyson Tuttle who discussed the IoT market and the importance of low-power and embedded technology in IoT devices. From data security to furthering adoption, news announcements from companies in attendance spanned the gamut of IoT topics. ARM, for example,  introduced its mbed™ IoT Starter Kit – Ethernet Edition to channel data from Internet-connected devices directly into IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. The kit, which consists of an ARM mbed-enabled development board from Freescale, is meant to accelerate the availability of connected devices by making product and service prototyping faster and easier.

IoT continues to be a focus for Spansion and we showed off our product lineup supporting the CAN FD protocol for automotive electronics and the industrial IoT (IIoT) at the event. The CAN FD (flexible data rate) standard builds on the success of the existing CAN protocol – the standard for harsh environments with wide temperature ranges and varying environmental situations. Not only is it faster than the former, it allows for a flexible data rate and larger packet size thus making it ideal for a number of applications, including body electronics, in-car networking and graphics clusters. Currently we offer single, dual and quad CAN FD interfaces on both Traveo and FM4 MCUs and, in the future, we expect to see architectures for up to eight channels per MCU.

I already mentioned that Spansion had the pleasure of having two presentations at the show and it’s no surprise that both sessions delved into IoT trends. First, my colleague Tom Sparkman discussed energy-harvesting devices and their potential to replace batteries in IoT sensors. As billions of devices continue to become connected, it also means billions of batteries must be purchased, maintained and, of course, properly disposed. Not only does energy harvesting present a power saving solution, it is also environmentally friendly. Check out this blog post from Tom Sparkman on the topic, in addition to this article featured in a recent issue of Core & Code devoted to embedded design for the IoT.

Heading into Embedded World, Spansion announced our HyperRAM™ memory, the first RAM device with our innovative HyperBus™ interface. This development enables a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution for SoCs and MCUs that extends fast read and write operations externally, allowing fast delivery of high-resolution graphics in the early part of the boot process for automotive, industrial and IoT applications.

Anytime IoT is mentioned, the conversation typically goes to security. By integrating HyperFlash and HyperRAM into one package (System-in-Package), designs can be simplified, leading to both cost and security benefits. The resulting package has fewer pins which can mean lower cost packaging and   allows embedded designers to ensure no bus pins are exposed, making hackingextremely difficult. For more on HyperRam, I encourage you to check out our official press releaseand this article in EE Times.

While Embedded World may be over, the conversation around IoT will continue to heat up. We look forward to working with our customers to develop faster, intelligent, secure and energy efficient electronics for the IoT.

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