What’s New in IoT Solutions 2022-23

IoT as a concept is nearing 25 but for most companies and businesses it is the last 5-7 years that make all the difference. The reason for this is that IoT has become viable from a technology, cost and business perspective. Behind this are advances in three areas:

·         Chip Technologies

·         Connectivity and Communication Capabilities

·         IoT Data and Application Platforms

Let us take a look at what has and is happening

Chip Technologies: Driven by Moore’s law, chip technologies continue to march down the road of more processing power AND lower power consumption. This has delivered the IoT SOC (System on a Chip) which combines 32bit microcontroller processing, a selection of connectivity technologies and specialized function on one chip. The recently released Renesas SmartBond DA1470x SOC combines ARM Cortex-M33 processing, Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, 2D graphics processing with display output, audio detection, USB, advance power management and cryptographic engine. Prices around $5 in volume it opens up advanced IoT capabilities to a large range of new product designs.

Lower power consumption opened up the whole new field of battery powered devices with battery lives of up to 5 years. Needless to say, we are not looking at massive processing power or high connectivity speed but over a cellular LTEm or NBIoT network they can deliver a couple of kbytes of date once every 24 hours meeting these specs. The IoT ‘Thing’ designer has a wide range of chip technologies to choose from when designing Iot products and solutions.

Connectivity & Communication Capabilities: The biggest advancement in IoT connectivity the last 5 years is no doubt the introduction of LTEm and NB=IoT that added low cost cellular connectivity with nationwide roaming at costs of about $1.month for 1MB of data. Progress among Near Area Network connectivity the most rapid advances have been made by Bluetooth driven by the need for connectivity to Smartphones. Chips for the latest 5.2 connectivity are available from Texas Instruments for less than $1. Low cost cellular IoT connectivity is migrating to 5G bringing the biggest connectivity capability we have seen since cellular, the ability to also communicate via satellite networks that start operating in 2023. This finally brings true ubiquitous IoT connectivity to the market available in every conceivable form, speed and cost. It is now up to the IoT solution architect to choose the right connectivity that meets the communication needs of the solution.

IoT Data and Applications Platforms: From 500 to 25 best summarizes what has happened in this area. From over 500 companies trying to market their IoT platforms ten years less than 25 still exist. The demise was driven by lack of viable business models (read $/device) and the emergence of cloud based IoT platforms from all leading cloud providers let by Amazon IoT core and Microsoft Azure IoT. This consolidation is continuing as Google just announced that they are retiring their Google Cloud IoT Core in August next year. Apart from AWS and Microsoft, remaining IoT platform players have been forced to focus on specific market segments or becoming the platform for small number of companies.

Creating IoT solutions using the components of IoT Core or Azure IoT is still a costly and time-consuming proposition taking more than a year and costing $Millions in development expenses. Even with the platform components developing functional solutions requires thousands of lines of code and substantial testing and integration efforts. The good news is that companies offering already integrated solutions are starting to appear on the market offering shorter IoT solution development times and lower costs – months instead of years and $100k instead of $million.

 Creating IoT Solutions in 2022-23 is very different from 5-7 years ago driven by the advances described above. Chip advancements are simplifying designs and allowing for lower IoT product costs, new communication technologies are allowing for ubiquitous deployment and low-cost connectivity and the emergence of cloud-based platforms dramatically reduce the costs and complexity if creating new and competitive IoT solutions faster than before.