ARM, Freescale, IBM Team Up on Industrial IoT Dev Kit

ARM, Freescale, and IBM this week introduced a development board for industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications, bringing together ARM's mbed operating system, the Freescale-designed dev board, and IBM's BlueMix cloud service.

The partners unveiled their IoT starter kit on Monday at Embedded World in Germany, according to Gigaom.

The new board sports an ARM Cortex M4-based processor and allows users to "port data from the board to the IBM IoT Foundation service, which acts as a kind of home for IoT data in IBM's cloud," Gigaom reported.

The cloud services deal with IBM is not exclusive, however. Gigaom quoted ARM marketing executive Zach Shelby as saying that the U.K. chip design firm "will likely design deals with other cloud providers and build an ecosystem of companies as it attempts to strengthen the mbed OS ecosystem."

Interestingly, ARM's mbed OS won't actually be released as a public beta until October, so the mbed-enabled starter kit only runs mbed systems level software, the site noted.

Freescale marketing director John Dixon called the new dev board "an Arduino for the industrial Internet," Gigaom reported.

Meanwhile, Freescale also announced some new initiatives at Embedded World "aimed at defining a unified set of guidelines and standards for the security of the IoT."

The chip maker said it will work with benchmarking group EEMBC to pinpoint critical IoT security gaps and work on "guidelines to help better secure IoT transactions and endpoints." Freescale also said it's building a security-focused research center at its Austin, Texas headquarters and "pledged to spend at least 10 percent of its annual R&D budget on IoT security technologies."