2020 has been an undeniably unique year, where smart, efficient, and virtual became significant features in our daily lives – along with hearing the word ‘unprecedented’. Whilst our ways of working may have changed, our attitude to research certainly has not - with our teams continuing to push the boundaries of ‘possible’. We even hosted our first virtual Arm Research Summit, where we brought over 500 academics, researchers and industry experts together to discuss the global technology challenges facing our society and planet. In Arm Research, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite blogs from the past year – the majority of which written in the comfort of our own homes.
As part of DARPA’s N-ZERO program, our team of researchers sought to overcome the challenges of using battery-powered devices, when it is not so simple to just change the batteries once they run out. Some devices are deployed in their thousands, in remote, inaccessible locations. A seemingly simple task becomes not so simple. Arm Research were tasked with designing an ultra-low-power microcontroller with a processor that has a power profile matched to a sensor – now better known as M0N0. With headline stats including 10µW active power, single battery cell operation (1V – 1.5V) and 20µW/MHz for an Arm Cortex-M33 with DSP and SIMD extensions’, there’s plenty to learn about power efficiency and battery-monitoring in this innovative project.
Explore M0N0
Arm Education announced our first online course on the edX platform this year, ‘Embedded Systems Essentials with Arm: Getting Started’. It is designed to introduce the world of embedded systems to the next generation of engineers, or those interested in the computer science sphere. With AI, 5G and IoT driving innovation and increasing the number of connected and smart devices accessible to us, embedded systems have become the building blocks of our connected world. The free course covers the fundamentals of the systems, including access to the Mbed simulator, which learners can download directly to their computer, with certification options available. Know someone who wants to develop their embedded systems knowledge, or perhaps interested yourself? Check out the course, and get learning.
The full story The course
The decreasing cost and power consumption of intelligent, interconnected, and interactive devices at the edge of the internet are creating massive opportunities. Whether that is to instrument our cities, factories, farms, or environment to improve efficiency, safety, and productivity. Developing, debugging, deploying, and securing software for the estimated trillion connected devices presents substantial challenges. As part of the SMARTER (Secure Municipal, Agricultural, Rural, and Telco Edge Research) project, Arm has been exploring the use of cloud-native technology and methodologies in edge environments to evaluate their effectiveness at addressing these problems at scale. In a five-part blog series, our researchers laid out their findings, from a smarter-CNI for Kubernetes to debugging a remote edge device.
The SMARTER blog series
New IoT applications that bridge the cyber and physical world are driving a need for increasingly smaller, lower-cost devices. With a finite resource of lithium coil cell batteries, researchers are looking toward energy harvesting – but this method can often be unpredictable. To ensure reliability over decades of deployment, energy-driven computing provides an adaptable solution. However, the complex relationship between energy availability, consumption and adaptive execution brings further difficulty to the matter. Open-sourced for energy-driven computers, Fused models execution, power consumption, and power supply in a closed feedback loop to correctly model the interactions between them. It also targets energy-driven embedded systems, and employs SystemC for digital and mixed-signal simulation to model a microcontroller and mixed-signal circuitry, enabling hardware-software codesign and design space exploration. How could Fused help your research? Head to the GitHub repository, or learn more about the project in our blog post.
Discover Fused
When Dr. Timothy Jones finished his PhD and was looking to establish his career, one email to Arm changed everything. It led to new collaborations, invaluable industry insight and a high-level mentor – opportunities he continues to pass on to the next generation of researchers. In an in-depth interview, he speaks about his research in computer architecture and compilers, sharing the mutual value of industry-academia partnerships.
“The work we have done has had an impact within Arm, and looking forward, it would be fantastic to be able to pick up a device and say I helped develop some of the stuff inside it. Not many computer architecture academics can say that.”
Learn more about Timothy's journey
2020 has been a year of uncertainty in many ways, although one that has sparked innovation across technology. We have selected a few highlights here, but the ecosystem has continued to join forces to solve some of the most intriguing technology challenges – for example in Project Triffid being where the possibility of batteryless Arm devices is being explored. Or Arm’s Transactional Memory Extension support in gem5, extending our commitment in the open-source community. Awards were won by John Biggs and Ben Fletcher, International Women in Engineering Day and National Inclusion Week was celebrated, and we enjoyed two Days of Care (a company-wide day to completely switch off from work). We are looking forward to what 2021 brings in technological innovation, and in what technology can empower beyond the industry.