IoT feels Samsung’s Artik breeze

“If you want to build a [smart]watch today, you have to build all these things step by step. We want developers to use this, add your display, add your battery, and go,” Young Sohn, chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics, said during the Internet of Things World conference.

Artik modules come in three sizes and speeds for a variety of IoT applications. Source: Samsung

Samsung’s development kit is available for selected developers today with the top-of-the-line Artik 10 module. The inch-long board uses a 64-bit Exynos octacore processor running at 1.3 GHz with 2 GBytes of on-board DRAM, and a ARM Mali T628 GPU. It packs 16 GBytes flash, a relatively large amount of local storage Samsung hopes will spur work on home servers, media hubs, and smart machines that require local intelligence.

The lower end of Samsung’s Artik offerings is a ladybug-sized module designed for location beacons and sensor hubs. Artik 1 has a 250 MHz dual-core Ineda processor along with 4 MBytes flash and a nine-axis motion sensor.

The midrange Artik 5 for smart-home hubs, drones, and IP cameras employs Samsung’s ePOP DRAM+flash memory as well as a 1 GHz dual-core ARM processor and ARM Mali 400 GPU.

Artik’s success and efficacy is due in large part to Samsung’s foundry business, Sohn said. “Having your own memory, and also being able to make own processors and connectivity solutions and being able to make your own modules — these require scale and investment and efficiency in the process.”

Samsung sports one big advantage over IoT component competitors such as Intel, Freescale, and Broadcom who came to this market much earlier. Besides making its own chips, it can rely in part on a giant internal customer in its home appliance group. Indeed, Samsung’s digital appliances and home division wants all of its devices to be connected by 2020.

Artik is designed for low power. Sohn said Artik 1 could last a month on a single charge, although Samsung did not elaborate on power specs for its higher level modules, or how it will achieve such low power.

Power consumption rates for the Artik modules will largely be determined by the connectivity method. Source: Samsung

The company is also trying to close the gap between various communication systems by adding various combinations of Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee on each of its platforms. Samsung does not have plans to add cellular connectivity to its modules because the IoT doesn’t typically require that kind of communication, MyungKoo Kang, vice president of IoT Technologies for Samsung, told EE Times.

Samsung will likely rely on a series of high profile partnerships to push Artik into the forefront of the IoT module battle.

“No one company can do everything these days because the market is too broad and diverse. Our view is [to] leverage existing communities,” said Curtis Sasaki, senior vice president of cloud services and innovation at Samsung. “We’re not wedded to a single OS, to single tool chain, we’re not wedded to a single cloud. We’re taking a very pragmatic and open ecosystem perspective,” he said.

Samsung partnered with Sansa Security to embedded chip-level security in Artik including policies for the provisioning of keys, activation codes, and encrypted software. Sohn added that the company also leveraged smart card security developed for the banking community to create hardware-supported encryption.

“Hardware and then security is something we think is extremely important,” Sohn said in his IoT World keynote. “I think this is just part of story and you’ll see us continue to work on this very critical issue. [Security will enable] OEMs to provide updates and avoid some of this premature obsolescence,” he added.

To navigate a rise of proprietary storage and communication systems, Samsung will launch Artik with support for SmartThings, the smart-home software startup it acquired last year.

“Bringing our own products to market took many, many months…and there are still barriers to innovation. Artik would have shaved our time to market,” SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson said, adding that the startup’s Open Cloud APIs will enable Artik developers to build devices without needing to build their own cloud services. Hawkinson added that approximately 19,000 devices connect to SmartThings and the platform supports more than 30,000 apps.

In an additional step toward open source development, Samsung partnered with Arduino to add Artik to the list of Arduino-supported processors. Samsung also aims to make Artik modules easier to program through a partnership with Temboo, a cloud-based code generating platform.

A partnership with Sigfox, which is building a wide-area IoT network, demonstrated how the module can work with multiple communications and networking standards. Sigfox recently launched an IoT network in San Francisco, and demonstrated a stolen bicycle tracking system at IoT World.

“We are keen to work with innovative partners, like Sigfox, to showcase the Artik platform’s ability to support multiple technology standards that solve real-world problems,” Sasaki said in a release.

The Artik development kit comes with an Artik 10 board, power supply cables, and a full software development kit. The modules are priced between $10 and $100. To inspire high-profile uses for the modules, Samsung announced a contest that will award $100,000 to the developers of a device that best helps solve the California water crisis.

Artik modules will be used in Samsung’s consumer electronics division, Sohn said. The company will roll out additional members of the module family, he added.

“I think you’ll see more members of the Artik family, maybe [including some with] built-in modems,” Sohn said during a media roundtable. “Those options are available. If someone needs high speed LTE without going through Wi-Fi, we can discuss that too.”

About the author:
Jessica Lipsky, Associate Editor, EE Times