The IDK has been designed to be flexible which means that it has the necessary scope to address a broad spectrum of industry sectors from environmental monitoring and healthcare, to industrial control and wearable electronics.
The baseboard features ON Semi’s NCS36510 system-on-chip (SoC), with a low power-optimised 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 core, running the ARM mbed OS. By attaching different daughter boards to the Wi-Fi enabled IDK baseboard, a broad range of connectivity protocols can be added e.g. SIGFOX, Thread, EnOcean, Wireless Mbus, Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, PoE, CAN, etc. A variety of sensors and actuators can also be added.
In addition, the portfolio includes support for numerous functions important for implementing security, including encryption, secure debug, secure boot and authentication.
This, in turn, is complemented on the software side by an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) that includes a C++ compiler, debugger and code editor. A comprehensive set of application examples, use cases and related libraries have also been incorporated into the package, in order to facilitate the process of taking IoT designs from the initial concept phase through to full scale deployment. In addition to the default cloud software platform, support for industry standard Cloud connectivity protocols (MQTT and REST) allows utilisation of other widely used IoT cloud service providers.
“So far semiconductor vendors have not adequately seized on the total range of opportunities the IoT embodies, offering just single board solutions that have fixed connectivity and sensor options. What is needed is a far less restricted, completely modular approach,” states Wiren Perera, who spearheads IoT Strategy at ON Semiconductor.
“Facilitating extensive configurability in out-of-the-box prototyping requires a broad portfolio of sensors, connectivity and actuators,” said Michael Horne, deputy general manager and vice president of marketing and sales, IoT Business, ARM. “This IoT Development Kit (IDK) utilises ARM mbed OS and simplifies the complexities of IoT development, enabling customers to focus on key IoT solution differentiators.”