The United Kingdom-based microprocessor designing company ARM has announced that its 32-bit architecture would be introduced for its small Cortex-M processors to help secure Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
At present, ARM’s annual developer conference, ARM TechCon, in Santa Clara, California, United States of America is on, from where a host of big ticket announcements have come out. In attendance are chip architects, software developers, designers, hardware engineers, among others.
The Cambridge-based ARM licenses its technology designs to nearly 400 semiconductor companies from around the world. The new security technology, long used in its smartphone processors, is called TrustZone. ARM said the tech would make it harder for hackers to break into IoT networks and even hardware like industrial equipment, medical devices and networked cars.
On the first day of ARM TechCon 2015, officials unveiled the ARMv8-M architecture, which brings ARM’s TrustZone security technology to the billions of small devices that make up the IoT.
The move enables chip manufacturers and end users to leverage a single architecture and security technology—which is also used by other ARM chip designs, including its ARMv8-A 64-bit architecture aimed at servers and other systems running rich operating systems, and ARMv8-R, a 32-bit design for real-time systems—for the entire infrastructure.
Further, on its official blog, ARM said it was releasing the ‘mbed Device Connector’, a service for developers to connect and manage up to 100 devices and handling up to 10,000 events an hour. This would be available for free.
The console will help users get started in minutes, access example code for applications and connect to Cloud partners quickly.
What’s new in mbed OS Technology Preview?
When mbed OS beta version was earlier announced, it was a combination of OS and developer tools. Together, they focused on offering the building blocks for IoT build on inter-operable standards, ready for next generation connectivity and with strong foundations of security. mbed OS was a new operating system built with the strong security, connectivity and manageability for large-scale IoT deployments in mind.
The release of the first public mbed OS Technology Preview version and associated tools came with features that would help users “take full advantage of the IoT devices.”
Image Credit: ARM