Arm has made a number of moves in the last two years to increase support for IoT developers, its latest effort coming this week in the form of a deal under which Arm has licensed virtualization technology from Corellium and integrated it with the Arm Virtual Hardware (AVH) platform to accelerate IoT device development and testing.
“We are committed to simplifying IoT development and enabling software and hardware co-design, stated Mohamed Awad, vice president, IoT and Embedded at Arm. “Through our partnership with Corellium, we have been able to rapidly expand Arm Virtual Hardware, an entirely new way for software developers to innovate and accelerate product design for diverse IoT devices, all in the cloud.”
The Corellium partnership comes about one year after Arm announced the AVH platform as part of its unveiling of the Arm Total Solutions for IoT product suite.
Using hypervisor-based virtualization technology enables hardware and software co-design for developers to verify and validate embedded and IoT applications.
As Bill Neifert, Senior Vice President of Partnerships at Corellium, explained, many IoT software development methodologies are “fairly primitive and non-scalable,” although the hurdles to accelerating development may vary based on where a company is in the design cycle.
“If you have a previous generation of the device, a lot of software development will be done on older models in hopes of minimizing the development task when the new hardware shows up,” Neifert told Fierce Electronics via email. “You’re then in a mad dash when you get hardware to get the software up and running since every day you spend porting software is a day that the device isn’t shipping. You then build up a farm of these new devices to sit next to your farm of old devices to validate future software changes.”
Neifert said that companies that do not have older hardware in hand will need to either wait until they get new devices before they can advance software development, which can further delay product shipment, or assemble a prototype in hardware or software to enable development.
“Hardware prototypes can take some dedicated engineering resources to build and typically rely upon costly FPGAs or emulators,” he said. “With the cost factor, these are often shared resources that limit team access and since they’re hardware they can be difficult to debug.”
Neifert added, “If you go the virtual prototype route, you need a team to assemble the prototype and write models for any components that you don’t have models for from the IP vendor (which is most of them). You’re then stuck running at virtual prototype speeds that are typically in the single digit MIPS and typically make your software team very unhappy.”
Getting back to the notion of device farms that Neifert mentioned earlier, he said, “If you go the device farm route to implement your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) flow, you’re going to need a farm for each revision of the device and you’re then going to need to maintain that farm, deal with what happens when devices fail or behave intermittently. You’re going to have all the space and power headaches as well. Basically, you’ll have all the headaches that tech companies used to have to deal with their compute resources in the days before cloud computing.”
Cloud-based IoT device virtualization overcomes all of this because it can be leveraged regardless of availability of the new hardware. Virtualized devices can even be created while chips are still in development, and often will perform faster than the real hardware for development purposes.
“These virtualized devices have all of the functionality of the real hardware but with the debuggability and observability that comes from virtual execution,” Neifert said. “They can scale up or down just like any other cloud resource and can be deployed around the world via the internet. Being cloud resources, they can tie into all of the modern cloud-based flows and resources to enable CI/CD and DevSecOps.”
While Neifert declined to reveal further terms of the Arm partnership, he said, “It would be fair to expect that there will be additional Corellium hypervisor boards made available on AVH on a regular basis and additional solutions crafted which leverage this virtualization technology together with other cloud-based flows and methodologies.”