Unlocking M2M Market Potential

Sierra Wireless and ARM work

together to accelerate M2M
innovation and application
development
2
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
Introduction
The market for cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) applications is seeing tremendous
growth, with analysts forecasting 12 billion M2M connected devices by 2020. Even so,
some business and technical barriers remain that are preventing M2M applications from
evolving as rapidly as they otherwise might.
On the business side of the equation, the fact is that bringing an M2M application from
concept to execution in the marketplace remains a complex, time-consuming and
expensive proposition. The most signicant culprit: the need to integrate all of the essential
components of the M2M systemwireless modem, application processors, low-power
microcontroller, specic hardware interfaces, operating system, application framework,
cloud connectivity, etc.as a bespoke solution for each M2M application. The result is that
too often, OEMs and enterprises spend the bulk of their resources and engineering cycles
performing basic system integration tasks, instead of on the area where they can provide
the most value the application itself.
Signicant technical barriers persist as well, chiey the need for more energy efcient
microprocessors within M2M devices. Many M2M applications (in metering, industrial
equipment, energy generation and exploration, digital signage and many other areas)
must operate in environments with no readily available power source, and must do so
for many years. Without an efcient, small-footprint power option, many M2M solutions
are more cumbersome than they could be. In some cases, the lack of an effective low-
power microprocessor means that M2M applications are simply not viable, even when
there would be a clear business value in deploying them. Having the ability to run a cellular
connected device in an ultra-low-power energy-efcient mode becomes critical in use
cases that demand very long device lifetimes running on constrained power supplies such
as battery, solar and energy harvesting. Typical use cases that traditionally have been out
of the reach of cellular M2M solutions include examples such as remote environmental
monitoring and wearable continuous medical monitoring devices. Both of these examples
require the device to run for very long periods in a low-energy sensor monitoring mode
with occasional pushing of data to the cloud over a wireless connection. The mixed-mode
requirements of low-energy monitoring and occasional bursts of wireless access require
careful system and architectural consideration to fuse these two modes efciently together.
Sierra Wireless and ARM have joined forces to address these challenges. Sierra Wireless is
providing a new generation of pre-integrated multicore solutions that provide an entire M2M
3
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
ecosystem on a module, radically simplifying the process of developing and deploying new
M2M applications. ARM is supporting this effort by providing the extremely energy-efcient
ARM Cortex-M series processor as part of the Sierra Wireless multicore solution, as well as
bringing its global community of ARM developers and partners to support the development
of new M2M applications that take advantage of it.
The result is a powerful new platform for building M2M solutions more quickly, efciently,
and inexpensively. Ultimately, these innovations will allow OEMs and enterprises to apply
M2M innovation to a much broader set of applications and business challenges than has
been possible before.
Meeting Cellular M2M Market Requirements
The M2M market is becoming more dynamic every day, with large numbers of small and
midsize companies now beginning to apply M2M to diverse applications and business
needs. This long tail of M2M development is essential to the evolution of the technology,
but the barriers to success, especially for smaller rms, remain high. Chiey, it still takes far
too long for organizations to develop, prototype and scale new M2M applications.
The reason for this is that, unlike with other technology platforms such as smartphones
and PCs, developers have not been able to use pre-integrated chipsets and platforms
to build their solutions. Rather, for every new M2M application, developers have had to
reinvent the wheel, building an entire system architecture virtually from scratch. Before they
can even begin testing and certifying a new solution, engineers must spend valuable time
and resources integrating all system componentswireless modem or module, satellite
navigation services (such as GPS) when applicable, interfaces to communicate with the
device or sensor being connected, memory, standalone processor to control the whole
architectureas if no one had ever built an M2M device before.
This approach signicantly slows time-to-market of new M2M solutions, and makes M2M
development cost far more than it should. From the developers perspective, the inability
to abstract M2M hardware and rapidly prototype new solutions also impedes innovation.
Fortunately, these challenges are beginning to recede, thanks to a number of important
trends in the M2M sector. These include:
4
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
Pre-integrated modules that provide the entire system architecture on pre-
integrated silicon. This trend has already swept many other markets, and is the
natural next step in M2M. Previous generations of smartphones, for example were built
using standalone application processors and modems, integrated by the manufacturer.
Today, most smartphone manufacturers use fully integrated chipsets that provide all
of the basic computational functions and build their solutions on top of that. By
simplifying the cellular ecosystem and value chain, these pre-integrated architectures
have helped smartphone manufacturers reduce the footprint of their products, improve
performance and lower materials costs. Now, these same benets can extend to the
M2M market as well.
Ready-to-use application frameworks and development tools. Just as developers
have had to integrate their M2M hardware from the ground up, so too have they had
to develop entire software stacks to run their M2M solutions. Such development tools
that have existed to support these efforts are typically closed and proprietary, built for
a specic vendors hardware and development environment. Now, for the rst time,
developers can take advantage of open embedded application frameworks. This puts
a substantial set of M2M development tools at their disposaloperating systems
designed for M2M applications, a large set of software libraries, powerful, easy-to-use
integrated development environmentthat will rapidly accelerate embedded software
development for M2M solutions.
M2M cloud management. Any successful M2M deployment requires scalable device
management to allow customers to update rmware and software applications,
congure devices and manage airtime subscriptions across global networks. New cloud
management platforms allow OEMs and enterprises to manage millions of deployed
devices over the air.
Increasingly efcient microprocessor options. To address the demands of a broader
set of M2M business cases, microprocessor providers have developed new low-
power solutions designed specically for M2M applications. These new solutions offer
advanced features such as deep sleep states to rapidly power down the entire device
and interrupt handling abilities to minimize latency. These capabilities optimize power
efciency and enable multiple years of operation on a small cellular battery.
5
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
Large and growing developer community. M2M technology is novel enough that
many developers, especially those working on truly new and unique applications,
have had a difcult time nding resources and guidance. Today, a large and growing
M2M developer community is providing tools, knowledge, and open-source integrated
development environments for both M2M application development and the low-power
processors that these applications use.
Sierra Wireless M2M Innovation
Sierra Wireless is the global leader in M2M devices and cloud services, delivering intelligent
wireless solutions that simplify the connected world. Sierra Wireless has a well-earned
reputation for helping OEMs innovate with condence, offering highly reliable, high-
performance M2M modules, a comprehensive M2M cloud management offering and
more than a decade of experience providing the industry-leading Open AT embedded
application framework with development tools and libraries. Now, Sierra Wireless is
breaking new ground in M2M with the introduction of the industrys rst pre-integrated
M2M modules, providing an entire M2M ecosystem on a module. This next-generation
family of AirPrime modules combines:
A powerful multicore architecture that includes cellular connectivity plus a dedicated
processor to run the M2M application. This integrated M2M ecosystem on a module
simplies system design, lowers total system cost, and dramatically reduces power
consumption.
Built-in connectivity to secure cloud services, providing simple integration of machine
data with enterprise applications and convenient remote management that scales
easily to millions of devices. These integrated cloud capabilities provide everything
OEMs need to support over-the-air management of SIMs, application data and M2M
devices, pre-packaged within the embedded application framework.
Open application framework with ready-to-use building blocks, including a substantial
set of M2M libraries and development tools that save time for embedded software
developers and help them get their products to market more quickly
By providing this entire M2M ecosystem on a module, Sierra Wireless is taking a major
step forward in simplifying the integration of embedded wireless communications and
dramatically reducing the time to market of new M2M applications. Ultimately, developers
6
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
will be able to spend more time developing and innovating in their core application and
business model, and less time worrying about the challenges of integrating wireless
communications.
Despite the novelty of multicore architectures for M2M, Sierra Wireless has the size, reach,
established wireless ecosystem relationships and global support infrastructure to help
OEMs capitalize on this technology innovation. Sierra Wireless intelligent wireless solutions
are simple, scalable, and secure, and enable customers to successfully bring wireless
applications to market more quickly and at lower total cost.

ARM Energy-E cient Microprocessors
ARMs record of developing of low-power technology has made it the microprocessor of
choice for a broad range of handheld and battery driven devices with eight of the top ten
microcontroller unit (MCU) vendors shipping Cortex-M processor-based devices. In 2012
alone, more than 2 billion processors went into embedded applications, accounting for 65
percent of the entire 32-bit MCU market.
Figure 1. Overview of Sierra Wireless Intelligent Device to Cloud offering
7
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
The ARM Cortex-M series of processors has been specically designed and optimized
for cost- and power-sensitive embedded applications. This includes MCU and mixed-
signal devices for end applications such as smart metering, human interface devices,
automotive and industrial control systems, white goods, consumer products and medical
instrumentation.
Many microcontrollers are used in battery-powered devices and the efcient handling of
control tasks is essential for many of these devices. The peripherals being controlled cover
very wide ranges: ADC, DAC, LCD, SD cards, general purpose I/O pins (e.g. LED, buttons),
etc. In some cases, the peripheral control processes take up the majority of the execution
times in the microcontrollers.
As with all processors in the series, the Cortex-M0 processor includes a number of
innovative features with these applications in mind that enable the processor to provide
optimum performance with ultra-low energy consumption and a tiny footprint.
Interrupts are a major feature of most embedded software and effective real-time response
to interrupts is a vital feature of microcontrollers controlling low-power systems. These
systems often rely on a run fast then stop approach to energy efciency. Where power
consumption is important, as in battery-operated devices, effective low-latency interrupt
handling becomes even more critical to low-power operation, and may also wake
a microcontroller from a sleep state where the processor is halted until required to do
something by a peripheral event.
To address this requirement, the Cortex-M0 processor closely integrates a congurable
Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC) to deliver industry-leading interrupt handling
abilities. The tight integration of the processor core and NVIC provides fast execution of
interrupt service routines (ISRs), dramatically reducing the interrupt latency. To optimize
low-power designs, the NVIC integrates with sleep mode which can include a deep sleep
function that enables the entire device to be rapidly powered down.
An Easy-to-Use Solution
In addition to interrupt handling, there are many more factors that make the Cortex-M
series processor easy to learn and use.
8
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
The Cortex-M series processors are designed to be very C friendly with almost all the
operations able to be programmed in C. The instruction set also allows 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit
and even 64-bit data to be processed efciently. In addition, the Cortex Microcontroller
Software Interface Standard (CMSIS), an initiative driven by ARM, has made the learning
process much easier. The CMSIS-Core library provides access function header les to the
processors features, and standardizes the look and feel of peripheral denitions in different
Cortex-M processor-based devices.
All major microcontroller vendors provide CMSIS-compliant device driver libraries to make
it easy for software developers to develop software on Cortex-M processor-based devices.
The libraries contain all the peripheral register denitions and driver functions for setting up
and using of the peripherals. The CMSIS-Core libraries are also tool-independent, allowing
better software portability and safeguarding of your software investment.
Another useful part of the CMSIS is the free digital signal processor (DSP) library that allows
software developers to create DSP applications with the Cortex-M processor quickly and
easily, without any royalty or licensing costs. The DSP library is optimized for the Cortex-M4
processor, but it can also run on the Cortex-M0 processor if the performance requirement
is low.
For development of complex projects, the ARM software ecosystem is an indispensable
resource. There are more than 30 operating systems, including a number of open-source
Oss, that can work on the Cortex-M series processors. There are also plenty of middleware
packages available, including many free libraries from tool vendors and microcontroller
vendors.
Assisting Developers with mbed
To enable developers to rapidly and easily prototype their MCI designs ARM, together
with its partners and a rapidly growing online community, has developed the online mbed
platform. The mbed platform provides a standards-based C/C++ software development
kit (SDK), a microcontroller hardware development kit (HDK) and supported development
boards, an online compiler and online developer collaboration tools for professional rapid
prototyping of products based on ARM microcontrollers.
9
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
An Energy-E cient Architecture for Cellular Connected
Devices
Taking advantage of Sierra Wireless and ARM innovations, OEMs and enterprises can now
build more power-efcient and exible M2M solutions than ever before. The combination
of ARM Cortex-M low-power microprocessors with the Sierra Wireless pre-integrated
multicore architecture enables solutions that offer:
Faster time-to-market thanks to Sierra Wireless pre-integrated architectures, as well as
new M2M development tools and support from ARM and Sierra Wireless
Reduced size and power consumption with pre-integrated modules that have a smaller
footprint than conventional system architectures, combined with low-power ARM
microprocessors that can operate with smaller batteries
Increased efciency with the ability to eliminate basic system integration tasks and use
fewer components, reducing overall development costs and time to market
Improved performance with dedicated application cores for cellular connectivity and
the M2M application
Improved security with pre-integrated modules that provide fewer points of entry for
potential attackers and a broad range of security features and capabilities tailored to
the specic needs of each application
Simplied deployment with pre-integrated hardware, software and cloud management
building blocks that are developed to suit the unique requirements of carrier networks
in diverse markets, reducing testing and certication requirements
Thriving M2M developer communities, supported by both Sierra Wireless and ARM,
that provide support and development and prototyping tools to help even smaller
companies and new entrants into the M2M space develop innovative, successful M2M
applications
Together, these capabilities can make a substantial difference in a variety of real-world
applications.
10
2013 Sierra Wireless Inc.
A Partnership for Future M2M Innovation
New M2M technology innovations can reap signicant rewards, but OEMs and enterprises
need to be condent that they can be successful, even as they do things differently. OEMs
embarking on this transition need more than technology vendors and wireless suppliers,
they need partners investing in their success, who are committed to helping them solve
their business challenges.
ARM and Sierra Wireless are strategic M2M partners, providing a unique combination of
technology and developer support that radically simplies the process of developing, testing
and prototyping M2M applications, and allows customers to rapidly bring new solutions to
the marketplace. Together, these capabilities can help customers of all sizes develop more
innovative applicatons and capitalize on the M2M revolution.
For more information visit www.sierrawireless.com/nextgenmodules