September 2016
20
C
ontrollers
& P
rocessors
IoT opportunity demands new approach
to MCU-based embedded designs
By Stefan Ingenhaag,
Renesas
The stakes in the IoT market are high.
In this hyper-competitive environment,
traditional approaches to product
development hardly suffice.
This article introduces the Renesas
Synergy Platform, each element
of which, silicon, software, tool
ecosystem, kits and reference designs,
contributes to a shorter, quicker
development cycle.
Let’s face it – the opportunity the IoTmarket
offers is unprecedented. The numbers alone
are staggering. Analysts at Gartner Inc. esti-
mate that 4.9 billion connected devices will be
in use by the end of 2015, up 30 percent from
2014. Five years from now they expect that
number to jump to 25 billion. By then those
same analysts expect 10 billion connected
devices (excluding PCs, smartphones, and
tablets) will ship each year into a market that
researchers at IDC forecast to be worth over
$7 trillion. At the heart of this exciting new
market lies the 32-bit microcontroller (MCU),
the source of the intelligence built into the
majority of edge devices and hubs across
the IoT. As the build-out of the IoT takes off,
research firms such as IC Insights are project-
ing 32-bit MCU sales will grow by a CAGR of
9.5% through 2018.
As an industry-leading manufacturer of
MCUs, Renesas offers developers some natu-
ral advantages. The company offers prospec-
tive customers unparalleled experience in a
number of critical vertical markets including
medical, home appliances, building automa-
tion, factory automation, and energy manage-
ment. The extensive knowledge base Renesas
brings to these markets gives the company
unmatched insight into the challenges devel-
opers face. And the company value proposi-
tion in terms of quality, reliability, support,
security and safety is tailored to match cus-
tomer needs in those markets. But the IoT
market is different. One of the toughest chal-
lenges the IoT market brings is its impact on
the pace of development. Today everyone
understands that those who bring their prod-
uct to market first reap the largest profits. But
the advantage of beating the competition to
market doesn’t end there. For the most part,
today’s IoT market lacks accepted industry
standards. Those who get to market first will
have the greatest opportunity to influence
those standards and gain an edge over the
competition.
Second, the IoT market forces embedded
developers to reconsider their definition of
system-level design. They have to stop think-
ing of their application as a discrete unit.
Instead, they must think in a broader sense
about how their application fits into an inter-
connected world. That, in turn, will force
developers to adopt new technologies. As new
communications, security, user interfaces and
sensing technologies become increasingly
commonplace, embedded designers building
products for the IoT market must enhance
their skills and knowledge of connectivity, the
cloud, and portable applications. Most of the
MCUs currently in use were never networked
in the traditional sense. Few developers have
the expertise they need to build those designs.
Most developers will require a deeper under-
standing of connectivity and security issues
and large, complex networks to succeed in the
IoT market.
At the same time, universal interconnec-
tivity increases system vulnerability. Secu-
rity risks lie at each stage of the product
lifecycle from manufacturing and develop-
ment to deployment and remote updates.
Most devices connected to the Internet
today have inadequate security capabili-
ties. Clearly developers will need a far better
command of security and safety technolo-
gies to meet customer expectations.
Each of these trends forces developers to
devote more time to testing and debugging
these new capabilities and to reconsider
design priorities. Yet designers face major
time and resource constraints as they try to
develop new embedded products for an IoT
market where product lifecycles are shrink-
ing along with time-to-market windows. In
this environment developers who can shorten
their product development cycle will likely
find more success meeting these elusive mar-
ket opportunities.
While the IoT market covers a broad field
of applications, most require a base set of
fundamental capabilities and peripherals.
