A study of current trends in the design of processors for the internet of things
Mohammad Tariq Banday · 2018
The advent of processors in early 70s has made a significant impact on our society. Since then, the continuous increase in integration density and speed, lower power consumption and better integrability with advances in communication technologies have paved the way for the Internet of Things (IoT) - a pervasive presence of interconnected and uniquely identifiable physical devices. The type of processors deployed inside connected devices is primarily influenced by the type of required sensing and communication features. As such they often integrate memory, peripherals both digital and analog, sensing/actuation logic and communication interfaces (both wired and wireless). The processors and architectures used by IoT devices define many of their capabilities, such as whether they are capable of strong security and encryption, low energy consumption, whether they are sophisticated enough to support an operating system, remotely upgradable firmware, high programmability and embedded device management agents. Due to a wide variety of IoT applications and diverse set of available processors, architectures and programming platforms determining an appropriate processor is very challenging. This paper explores current trends in the design of processors in terms of underlying hardware, architecture, Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), energy consumption, communication interfaces, security mechanisms, etc. that are advantageous for the Internet of Things. This paper further introduces feature set of present-day IoT processors.