With the increasing commercial interest in Internet of Things (IoT) the question about a reasonable hardware configuration surfaces again and again. Peter Aldworth, a hardware engineer with more than 19 years of experience, discusses this topic in a presentation given to the IETF community.

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How to Select Hardware
forVolume IoT Deployment?
Peter.Aldworth@arm.com

2. How to Select Hardware forVolume IoT Deployment
 Very broad topic!
 Let’s start by focusing on MCU selection: 8/16-bit vs ARM Cortex-M processors
 We need to think beyond the processor HW
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 Think at the IoT product level and consider complete BOM costs including sensors, radio and PSU
 Consider tools/ecosystem too
 I’m hoping that this presentation is a starting point for our conversation on this topic
 Material presented here is preliminary/incomplete
 Please ask questions
 If there is interest I can run another presentation in the future to focus on your areas of interest

3. What Does Processor Selection Impact?
 HWproduct BOM
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 Direct cost of silicon area to implement 8/16-bit or 32-bit processor gives tiny contribution to BOM
 Indirect costs more important: Code density, Clock speed needed to meet required
performance/latency, power management features,MCU parts available with appropriate integrated
features
 Lifetime costs
 Operation period between battery replacement/recharge
 Ability to adapt to mid-life upgrade/update (firmware updates needing increased
performance/memory)
 Development and Deployment costs
 Modern development tools, languages, ease of code reuse, availability of comprehensive debug/trace
features

4. 8/16-bit vs ARM Cortex-M:Aren’t 32-bit Instruction Bigger?
 Most architectures have a range of
instruction sizes
 For Dhrystone:Average Cortex-M0
instructions size is only 17-bits
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 Application code density depends on
richness of instruction set & CPU arch
 Multi-transfer data operations
 Rich set of addressing modes
 Rich set of arithmetic operations
 Size of internal register bank
 Conditional execution
 Combined compare and branch
 Automated function entry/exit (stack)
 Size of directly addressable memory
 Example of Dhrystone code size in bytes
 8051 3186 bytes vs M3  900 bytes

5. 8/16-bit vs ARM Cortex-M:Aren’t 8/16-bit More Efficient?
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 8/16-bit processors require more clock
cycles to perform an equivalent operation
 More cycles to fetch instructions
 More instructions to perform an operation*
 More cycles for multiplies, divides etc
 More cycles to transfer data (narrower bus)
 Using aARM Cortex-M core enables
 Lower frequency (and lower voltage)
 Higher (maximum) performance
 Greater overall efficiency
* Better code density

6. 8/16-bit vs ARM Cortex-M: 32-bit MCUs are more expensive?
 Quick survey on http://www.newark.com/ (electronics component distributer):
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 Search for 8, 16, and ARM MCUs with
◦ 128KB – 256 KB of “Program Memory”
◦ 16KB – 32KB of “SRAM”
◦ Results only show prices for low volume purchase so not representative of high volume BOM cost
 22 results for 8-bit MCU: Price range $3.40 - $9
 120 results for 16-bit MCU: Price range $3 - $40
 370 results for ARM MCUs: Price range $1.80 - $19
 If you compare MCUs with similar features ARM based designs are the same price or
cheaper than 8/16-bit devices
 Lowest IoT product BOM will use modern MCUs integrating radio etc.

7. 8/16-bit vs Cortex-M:What About Power Consumption?
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 Cortex-M processors have architecturally
defined power modes
 Complete operation then sleep
 Code density saves power
 NOR Flash reads are a large part of power
budget
 Better code density means fewer reads to
execute application
 Cortex-M + cache saves more power
 Few cycles and shorter execution time
means that MCU spends more time in low
power state

8. ARM® Cortex®-M Product Line
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Lowest cost
Low power
Lowest power
Outstanding energy efficiency
Performance efficiency
Feature rich connectivity
Digital Signal Control (DSC)
Processor with DSP
Accelerated SIMD
Floating point (FP)
Digital Signal Control application space
‘16/32-bit’Traditional ‘8/16-bit’Traditional application space application space
Low power implementation
Sleep mode support
Wake-up Interrupt Controller
Increased intelligence at node
Broad tools and OS support
Binary compatible roadmap
CMSIS support
Pure C target
32-bit RISC architecture
High efficiency processor cores
Integrated Interrupt Controller
Thumb®-2 code density
Area optimised designs
CoreSight™ support

9. ARM® Cortex® Processor feature set comparison
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Cortex-M0 Cortex-M0+ Cortex-M3 Cortex-M4
Instruction set architecture Thumb, Thumb-2 System
Instructions
Thumb, Thumb-2 System
Instructions
Thumb + Thumb-2 Thumb + Thumb-2,
DSP, SIMD, FP
DMIPS/MHz 0.84-1.21 0.93-1.31 1.25-1.89 1.25-1.95
CoreMark/MHz 2.33 2.42 3.32 3.40
Bus interfaces 1 1 (+1 opt.) 3 3
Integrated NVIC Yes Yes Yes Yes
Number interrupts 1-32 + NMI 1-32 + NMI 1-240 + NMI 1-240 + NMI
Interrupt priorities 4 4 8-256 8-256
Breakpoints, Watchpoints 4-0, 2-0 4-0, 2-0 8/2/0, 4/1/0 8/2/0, 4/1/0
Memory Protection Unit (MPU) No Yes (Option) Yes (Option) Yes (Option)
Integrated trace option (ETM or MTB) No MTB (Option) ETM (Option) ETM (Option)
Single Cycle Multiply Yes (Option) Yes (Option) Yes Yes
Hardware Divide / Saturated Math No No Yes Yes
WIC Support Yes Yes Yes Yes
Bit banding support System option System option Yes (Option) Yes (Option)
Single cycle DSP/SIMD No No No Yes
Floating point hardware No No No Yes(Option)
Bus protocol AHB Lite AHB Lite AHB Lite, APB AHB Lite, APB
Systick Timer Option Option Yes Yes
CMSIS Support Yes Yes Yes Yes

10. ARM® Cortex ® -MTools Ecosystem
 ARM has an exceptionally broad ecosystem of 3rd parties supporting the Cortex-M
profile processor family.
 Real-time Operating Systems
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 26+ of the world’s leading vendors
 IDEs and C/C++ compilers
 13+ of the world’s leading vendors
 Debugger vendors
 21+ of the world’s leading vendors
 … and these numbers are growing all the time

11. RTOSs IDEs and Compilers
 Cortex-M profile cores are supported by all of
the world’s major Real-time Operating System
vendors
 Many of these have uITRON-compliant
interfaces
 Many certified to international standards
 Many of these also sell software stacks covering
USB,CAN,TCP/IP, File Systems, GUI…
 Available at a variety of price points and
business models:
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 Free, open source
 Royalty-free
 Royalty per product family
 Safety-certified, safety-critical
 Cortex-M profile cores are supported by all of
the world’s major vendors of IDEs, including
C/C++ compilers, debuggers etc.
 Variety of C and C++ compilers targeting and
optimising for the Thumb-2 instruction set.
 Some based on Eclipse IDE, some proprietary
GUIs.
 Available at a variety of price points and
business models:
 Low-cost, based on open source
 Atollic, Code Red,CodeSourcery, Coocox,
Crossware, Raisonance, Rowley Associates
 Higher price, proprietary:
 Altium, GreenHills, IAR, Keil, Mentor,Wind River

12. Debug and Trace
 Cortex-M profile cores are supported by all of the world’s major debugger vendors
 Most of these support low-cost solutions using 2-pin SerialWire Debug (SWD).
 Many also support non-intrusive program trace using the EmbeddedTrace Macrocell
(ETM).
 All vendors support debugging of code compiled usingARM’s RealView compiler.
 Fully supported by key debug vendors in Japan.
 Wide variety of price points:
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 Low-cost “wiggler” type devices
 Mid-range full debug via JTAG
 Full system debug and trace at higher price point

13. ARM® Cortex®-M Software interface standard specification
 Abstraction layer for all Cortex-M processor based SoCs
 Provide quick software enablement for your design
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 with CMSIS compliant firmware, RTOS or stacks
 easy debug support of customer IC in tool chains
CMSIS-CORE
Abstraction Layer
CMSIS-DSP
61 DSP functions
CMSIS-RTOS
Integration API
CMSIS-SVD
System Viewer
CMSIS-DAP
Std Debug IF
Application/Firmware/Stacks
DEBUG

14. ARM® Sensinode™ NanoStack
http://www.sensinode.com/
 Field-proven communication stack for
IP-based wireless sensor networks
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Key Features
 RF interface support
 2.4 GHz (IEEE 802.15.4)
 Sub-1GHz (IEEE 802.15.4g)
 Supported IEEE and IETF standards
 6LoWPAN (ND, HC, RPL), UDPv6, ICMPv6,TCP
 Self-healing Mesh network
 Self-configurable
 Support for Multicast forwarding
 128-bit AES security support
 Network processor and library versions
 Support for 6LoWPAN Bootstrap and link-local
operation modes
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15. ARM® mbed™ - Accelerating IoT Deployment
http://mbed.org/
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 Rapid, professional IoT device development
 An open source platform and libraries for Cortex® -M
microcontrollers
 Modern C/C++ platform and ecosystem for developers
 Consolidating fundamental embedded building blocks
 Microcontrollers,Radios, Sensors, Software stacks
 Bluetooth®, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN,WiFi,Cellular
 Open Hardware reference designs
 Enable transitioning from prototype form
factor to custom product
MCUs
radios
sensors

16. HW Prototyping Platforms for IoT Devices
 NOTE:Cost of development systems is not representative of product costs!
 Low costARM based boards are available (e.g. FRDM-KL25Z ~$13 low volume)
 Increasing availability of MCU dev boards with integrated radio (e.g. Arch BLE ~$40)
 Higher end development boards also available (e.g. SAM4C-EK, STK3700)
 A good place to start:
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 http://mbed.org/platforms/

17. 2014 ARMTechCon – 10thYear!
http://www.armtechcon.com/
 ExpectedAudience – 4500 people
 Outstanding program agenda this year with more than 100 sessions
 Keynotes:
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 ChrisAnderson,CEO of 3D Robotics
 Erica Kochi, founder of the Innovation Labs at UNICEF
 ARM CEO Simon Segars
 ARM CTO and co-founder Mike Muller
 ARM EVP and President of Product Groups Pete Hutton
 75 technical sessions
 Software DevelopersWorkshop
 ARMAccredited Engineer Program
 ARM mbed Zone
 Expo floor features more than 90 exhibiting companies

18. Questions and Next Steps
 Why on earth would anyone want to develop IoT products with 8/16-bit MCUs?
 I’m very happy to follow up in more detail and respond to your questions/issues
 Please do come along to ARMTechCon
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