New Samsung ARTIK platform aims to accelerate IoT development

At yesterday’s Internet of Things World conference taking place in San Francisco, Samsung introduced its new range of chips designed specifically for IoT environments. The ARTIK family consists of three new chips, ranging from a tiny low power 12x12mm form factor up to a larger octa-core chip complete with a 6 core GPU. Each is designed around catering for more or less computationally demanding applications.

Starting with the biggest chip, the ARTIK 10 features eight ARM cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement that smartphone users will be familiar with. There are four Cortex-A15 cores at 1.3GHz stacked alongside four Cortex-A7 cores at 1GHz. This configuration is accompanied be 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16GB of eMMC storage and an ARM Mali T628 MP6 GPU, which allows for 1080p@120fps H.263/H.264/ MPEG-4/VP8 video encode and decode.

The ARTIK 5 is a slightly smaller chip, which features a dual-core 1GHz ARM-A7 CPU setup alongside a Mali 400 MP2 GPU. The chip also features 512MB of LPDDR3 RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage, as well as H.263/H264/MPEG-4/VP8 (720p) @30fps video encode and decode.

By far the smallest chip is the ARTIK 1. However, it is not powered by ARM technology, but instead contains an Imagination Technologies dual-core MIPS microAptiv CPU setup. The asymmetrical dual-core design features a microAptiv UP core for embedded systems that run rich operating systems and a microAptiv UC for fast execution of real-time operating systems, with each core clocked at 250MHz and 80MHz respectively. The tiny 12mmx12mm chip also houses a small 1MB on-chip and 4 MB SPI flash memory along with a 9 axis motion sensor. It is designed for low power wearables and IoT end nodes and can offer up to 3 weeks of battery life without recharging.

The ARTIK 1 features 5 buck converters and 25 low-dropout regulators for powering complementary components, while the larger ARTIK 5 and 10 feature additional general purpose I/O and ADC pins, along with connections for common UART, I2C, SPI and I2S communication standards, to support a wide range of embedded applications. All three platforms are full compatible with the popular Arduino IDE, as well as the Samsung SDK.

As you would expect from IoT designed packages, all three come with Bluetooth connectivity as a minimum, with the ARTIK 5 and 10 both sporting 802.11 b/g/n WiFi as well. There’s a cryptographic Samsung Secure Element on all of the chips, designed to protect them from tampering, and the larger ARM models also support ARM’s TEE (TrustZone) to fully separate the operating system from any potential rogue code.

Samsung ARTIK is currently taking applications for its alpha program, which will close on May 31^st. If you’re interested in working on some IoT implementations, you can apply for an Alpha Development Kit though this link.