Another in a Fierce Electronics series of previews from speakers at Sensors Converge 2023.
Q: At Sensors Converge 2023, you are speaking on an enablement ecosystem for developers working on low-power IoT design. Care to share a preview?
Purohit: Internet of Things is rapidly emerging as the next generation of a smart and connected world, where multi-scale sensors and devices are seamlessly blended for ubiquitous computing and communication. In my session, I will be discussing the importance of rapid development kits and the enablement ecosystem for accelerating customers’ low-power IoT designs using your products. I’d expect the audience will learn how the enablement ecosystem can help improve mass market adoption and increase ease-of-use.
Q: Why do semiconductor companies care about providing rapid development kits and the developers enablement ecosystem?
Purohit: As IoT devices proliferation grows by leaps and bounds and we are moving towards a world comprised of trillions of intelligent devices to make life easier. At the same time devices are getting more complex to use. You can have the most complex device in the market but that won't help your customer if you don’t enable how to use your device. Platform enablement is the key. Rapid development kits enable customers to quicken their evaluations and development phase. It also improves their time to market and ease of use.
Q: What are the IoT sensor benefits with an enablement ecosystem for developers?
Purohit: When we talk about low-power IoT designs and deploying in remote locations, It is imperative to have lower overall power consumption to reduce downtime for these devices. Our next generation intelligent devices are packaged with complex set of features. Most of the devices support configurable power modes that include deep-sleep modes, power-down modes, optimized middleware stacks etc. With increasing device complexities, it is getting difficult to use these devices to their full potential without a good enablement ecosystem offering. Platform enablement resources can help customers with “out-of-box” examples to describe how to easily migrate to configurable power modes, how to use device in interrupt mode to work in autonomous mode, and how to efficiently use capabilities of devices to get the most optimized solution.
Q: What is NXP doing differently to enable customers’ ease-of-use and how it is making their overall experience better?
Purohit: At NXP we are committed to providing the best customer experience while they explore and develop with our sensor products. We offer unmatched enablement and development flexibility with software and tools to simplify customer’s evaluation, development and design using NXP’s sensors. Our software and tools enablement ecosystem helps create differentiation at the edge. Integrating with unified SDK and tools offering from NXP further helps our customers with easy adoption. We are also very actively focusing on system solutions (cross-collaborating with other business lines within NXP) where we integrate sensors and demonstrate how multiple NXP technologies can be combined to offer ready to market solutions for customers.
Q: What’s the key takeaway from your “lightening talk” at Sensors Converge?
Purohit: The key takeaway: the low-power IoT market is getting quite aggressive and in order to keep up with the pace, easy enablement is of utmost importance to reduce evaluation, development and time to market.
Amit Purohit is Sensors Ecosystem & Tools Manager at NXP Semiconductors. He holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a post-grad certificate in AI and ML from University of Texas, Austin. His lightning talk happens 11:30 am PT on June 22 at Sensors Converge 2023. Sensors Converge runs June 20-22 in Santa Clara, California, and registration is available online.