Talking IoT Silicon at Bosch Connected World 2017

This year, ARM was invited to lead a session track at Bosch Connected World in Berlin. Bosch is not only a household name for their consumer lines, but perhaps even more importantly one of the most influential industrial OEMs in the world. They supply almost every automotive manufacturer on the planet, and have a massive footprint in industrial and infrastructure settings. 

This was the fourth annual Bosch Connected World, held in Berlin. This year featured tracks on artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomous driving, blockchain and other topics, along with an impressive keynote line up. This included Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, presenting their collaboration with Bosch to industrialize Nvidia’s automotive computing platform, the Drive PX line with the Nvidia Xavier architecture.

Kris Flautner, VP of technology and strategy for ARM, kicked off the IoT Silicon track with a summary of the landscape and challenges for delivering chips for the IoT that will scale to trillions of devices. This kind of number is no longer unimaginable when you look at the acceleration in shipments over the last few years. Kris presented the key concepts of computation, connectivity, security and services, and how ARM’s ecosystem is addressing these with technology, standards and partnership. Tom Pannell of Silicon Labs followed up with a focus on connectivity, particularly multi-protocol connectivity to support the variety of requirements different IoT deployments generate. NXP followed, with San Fuller presenting on their approach to deliver essential security building blocks in the chips they build for IoT. This includes ARM TrustZone as a fundamental foundation, and extends to include cryptography blocks, anti-tamper measures, secure boot loading and other components. A key concept expressed by both Kris and Sam is that security countermeasures must scale to match the threat environment – there are always tradeoffs. At the same time, security isn’t static in the era of ubiquitous connectivity – so support for over the air (OTA) updates and recovery is critical. Designing for security from the beginning is imperative – it is not something that can be added as an afterthought. 

Finally, Dr Martin Emele of ETAS joined the other speakers and host Rhonda Dirvin, director of segment marketing for IoT verticals at ARM, for a panel discussion and Q&A on IoT silicon. The focus was security and where chips are going in this regard. Key trends highlighted were security, size and cost. A couple of audience members asked about the cost trade-off for security – the panel were unanimous is agreeing there was a cost, although it varied in significance relative to different classes of device. Sam Fuller from NXP perhaps caught the sentiment best with an analogy to quality in the 1990s.  Companies learned that it was far cheaper to design quality in from the start.  Security should be thought of the same way.  Companies should consider the potential cost of not designing for security rather than the incremental costs of doing so.