If you've been following our Exploring the world of ARM based Embedded Computing Boards (ECB) project you know that Texas Instruments is a major player in the ECB market and their Sitara family of processors finds its way onto many boards (click on TI in the Embedded Computing Board (ECB) Resource Guide to see just how many boards). It was clearly time to get an update from TI so I connected with Adrian Valenzuela who is Marketing Director for ARM and DSP processors at Texas Instruments.
I've known Adrian since he was involved in the launch of the BeagleBoard back in 2009 (along with Jason Kridner) when we ran hands on training at the Embedded Systems Conferences in Boston and San Jose. The BeagleBoard was an instant hit and in hindsight it opened the door (along with Arduino) for this latest wave of Maker friendly boards which has culminated in the Raspberry Pi recently but it’s still got a long way to go in my opinion. Adrian told me the current generation BeagleBone Black has sold over 250,000 units and all BeagleBoards have always been based on the TI Sitara class of processors. The BeagleBoard was always an ARM-based 32 bit board and I think that’s significant because it could handle heavy workloads at low power right from version 1.
TI was very prescient in seeing how the Maker community might embrace the board and made Beagleboard a 501 (C) 3 non profit organization so the desire to collaborate and share code was not hindered at the start.
BeagleBoard.org is an amazingly prolific organization so go and subscribe to their newsletter and check out the projects and code repository. Highly relevant to our mission here on the ARM community was having Adrian confirm that many design projects that start on a BeagleBoard do cross over to production systems especially in 3D printers and drones which often start as open-source projects. I have heard this several times from designers and analysts who say that even though BeagleBoard targets students and hobbyists many professionals use it as well for a development reference design because it’s so inexpensive and easy to use (see Is the Maker movement changing Embedded design? An interview with Chris Rommel of VDC Research).
By the way I heard at Maker Faire that a new BeagleBone is due any minute called the BeagleBone Green, here is Jason Kridner telling the story:
Looking at the Sitara family it is targeted at the broad market industrial segment and they have enabled a rich ecosystem with a wide variety of solutions from TI and partners, development tools from low cost to feature rich and some vertical/application specific software packages (robotics, smart grid and motor control for example). The Sitara family consists of 28 processors that use the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 cores. The latest iteration of Sitara is the AM437x which is ARM Cortex-A9 based. TI has a broad range of ARM processors (212 devices!) from classic ARM9 to Cortex-A15 which is a lot for Adrian to manage, you can check them all out here.
Since Adrian is so knowledgeable about what’s really going on in the embedded board world I asked for his take on multi-core and multiOS systems and he agreed that heterogeneous computing is gaining popularity. The beauty of choosing a multi-core processor is not just because of throughout but as Adrian pointed out customers want multi-core because it’s a hedge, it’s insurance. Why not design with it in case the next version of the board will need more capability? After all, if it’s not being used, it’s not draining power but it might come in handy in the next revision. I think this is a very interesting trend but a lot of embedded developers seem to want to design just to the spec and ignore the extra headroom that a multi-core or much faster processor might offer. This legacy thinking may come from the fact that faster processors used to cost a lot of extra money and multi-core processing was hard but now I think that approach is narrow minded given the low pricing of some incredible processors. Sure an 8 bit processor may be good enough but why take the risk? Check out my What happens in mobile doesn't stay in mobile blog to see my point in more detail.
On the software front Adrian told me that many (if not most) embedded developers know C code well and can use OpenCL to work with multi-core processors so the barrier to entry is not high.
We also talked about what "industrial" means in the context of TI processors and he pointed out industrial is not limited to factories its actually very broad and includes medical but he did reiterate that TI will offer part support for a minimum of 10 years and sometimes many more years which the "industrial" market requires. As an aside I wonder about this conventional wisdom about long term support being important any more, technology is moving so fast and if you design a board based on a standard like COMExpress or Qseven why not just swap it out?
Another contentious topic I have heard a lot about is managing the GUI which is an issue with Linux because there is no standard, you simply choose a distro with a window manager you like and move on with your design. TI supports whatever their customers want and Adrian mentioned two approaches to GUIs, Wayland is used by a lot of TI customers as is Qt (Qt5 is the latest version).
Any conversation about processors has to touch on the IoT and as expected this is a huge opportunity for TI because they offer products all the way from the sensors to wireless to gateways. A perfect example is the HomeKit which runs on Sitara for example. Very few companies are as well placed as TI to take advantage of the IoT and I wonder why they don't get much credit for this?
Last but not least we had to talk security, Adrian told me that all popular Sitara devices have baseline security with cryptographic accelerators, secure boot and disk image signatures. The new Sitara part, the AM43x has more crypto’s than ever before and customers can burn their own keys and use tamper detect so it’s great for payment terminals. Adrian listed so many security capabilities even down to metal layers which are X-ray proof and thermal shielding to prevent password hacking (look it up) I was amazed. There really is no excuse for designing insecure systems with all of the tools and features TI offers in Sitara. The AM43x is also immune to voltage hacking. Security gets so much press but there are clever but not widely known ways to protect your system, it might be time to have a "private" conversation with TI about how to protect yourself.
A lot to absorb and think about but it’s clear that the TI portfolio has to looked at in detail by Embedded and IoT designers because it’s so broad. We know engineers rate the TI ecosystem highly and in the slide below (from the EETimes annual embedded survey) says it all:
In my post on the top 10 embedded dev boards which includes the Beaglebone most of them are 10/100, the table is here Embedded News roundup (June 15, 2015); Top dev boards, Pi, Beagle and Odroid. More M&A coming? Some don't have even have ethernet, its all a question of the use case for your design.