The ARM Single Board Computers has been up for a month now and on a weekly basis we are hearing about innovation in the board market and there is no better way to understand whats happening than talking to CTOs of board vendors so this week I spoke to Dirk Finstel, CTO of ADLINK. To be more precise Dirk wears two hats at ADLINK, he is CEO of the EMEA business and EVP of the computing module product segment (MCPS). Prior to ADLINK, Dirk was CTO at KONTRON one of the top embedded board vendors and has a long history of designing boards and embedded systems. Interestingly Dirk was involved in a very early attempt to bring ARM boards to market when he was at Kontron in 2002-2003 and worked on what were called X-boards (tagline was; reduced to the max). The first Kontron X-board used the National Semiconductor Geode SC1200 processor some of you may remember and later X-board versions used the Intel Xscale (ARM V5 instruction set) processor but the format never took off. Dirk and Kontron didn't give up on ARM small form factor boards because they along with ADLINK introduced the SMARC ("Smart Mobility ARChitecture") format along with industry partners and that standard is now open and driven by the Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies (SGeT). SGeT also manage the standards for the Qseven and EmbeddedNUC formats so is worth knowing a little more about, click on their logo for more information.
SMARC has been considerably more successful than X-board and is the de-facto standard for ARM based COM modules now with many members of SGeT producing boards.
It didn't take Dirk long to talk about software and operating system choice which for any CTO is always a critical and potentially high risk decision. If you get the OS wrong then transition costs to another platform can put a project back by months which no customer is going be thankful for. Dirk's key point on operating system choice is about the GUI (graphical user interface) which in many Embedded and IoT systems is becoming much more important as customers and end users expect large displays, touch control and video streaming. Dirk pointed out that Linux has no standard GUI and this leads to porting and licensing issues that are exacerbated for global customers so they tend to favor a known entity like Windows. This seems to be an important topic so we will revisit it in a later blog.
So then we moved onto the next CTO risk factor and that's security and while we were talking IoT came into focus as well. Dirk likes multicore processors because the security functionality can run on a separate core probably with an RTOS so there can be separation and more security. ADLINK take security seriously and have created a whole product platform for security, cloud and system management called SEMA (Smart Embedded Management). Dirk calls SEMA intelligent middleware and SEMA Cloud is exactly as described in that it connects devices to the cloud but in a carefully managed and secure way. This graphic below shows how the ADLINK SEMA concept works:
ADLINK takes an interesting approach to managing systems with SEMA by using an integrated microcontroller (board management controller, BMC) on the board, which communicates with the chipset over the System Management Bus (SMBus). The BMC can monitor temperature, communications, power issues etc. then report this data back to an operator via the cloud. In other words this is a managed intelligent system, see the diagram below to get an idea of how useful this can be:
SEMA is obviously well thought out and answers a lot of questions about how to deploy IoT applications and manage them securely. You can read more about ADLINK and their solutions here. Read more C level opinions here Exploring the world of ARM based Embedded Computing Boards (ECB).