Samsung Semiconductor's Open House event in San Francisco showcased the firm's new ARTIK platform, which it hopes will become a developer's tool of choice when building for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Announced last week at IoT World, the new open platform comes in three different shapes and sizes, which all include fairly advanced software, development boards, drivers, tools, security features and cloud connectivity.
The firm is also highlighting the embedded hardware security technology it has baked into all modules in the family, noting that it was the only company to have put such an emphasis on hardware-based security in a world that relies predominantly on software.
The diminutive ARTIK 1 is the smallest IoT module being touted, and Samsung claimed it is currently the smallest in the industry, measuring just 12 x 12 mm. The little module packs Bluetooth/BLE connectivity and a nine-axis sensor at extremely low power.
Meanwhile, the ARTIK 5, which Samsung said is "ideal for home hubs, drones and high-end wearables" boasts a 1 GHz dual-core processor and on-board DRAM and flash memory.
The biggest of the three modules, the ARTIK 10, apparently packs as much compute power as the newest Samsung Galaxy phones, with an eight-core processor, full 1080p video decoding/encoding, 5.1 audio and 2 GB DRAM, along with 16 GB flash memory. It also sports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE and ZigBee connectivity, so it can run home servers and media applications and can be used in industrial settings.
In addition to its embedded hardware security system, Samsung also said that at an application level, all members of the ARTIK family are equipped with a machine learning-based anomaly detection system to allow users to identify abnormalities and unusual behavior and rapidly shut down hacking attempts.
The platform also boasts "extensive IoT software stack and tools," which the company purports will accelerate product development, as developers won't need to waste time building low-level software libraries.
As small as they might be, the modules all offer local storage and computational capabilities so data can be managed locally or in the cloud in encrypted or unencrypted formats. Samsung also claimed to offer best-in-class power consumption owing to a tiered architecture that allows applications and tasks to run at the right power-optimized performance and memory utilization.
Even though it was only released last week, Curtis Sasakai VP of ecosystem at Samsung Semiconductor, said he has already seen some interesting demos built by developers on the platform, including one attached to a water tank and a pump. The application monitored the water to see if it dropped below a certain point, and if it did, it called the owner's cellphone so he could refill the tank with the tap of a button.
There has also been some discussion around the ARTIK 1 being used in a shoe insert to determine walking patterns, and drone firms have expressed interests in the larger boards.
Thus far, Samsung has been handing development boards out for free to get momentum going, but Sasakai admitted the company will start charging "at some point later in the year."
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