The Internet of Things and FPGA

Gérald Santucci, Head of Unit Internet of Things and Future Internet Enterprise Systems, in his speech in Feb 2011, “The Internet of Things: A Window to Our Future”, said “The Internet of Things (IoT) will primarily expand communication from the seven billion people around the world to the estimated 50-70 billion machines. Ericsson envisions a world of 50 billion connections within the current decade.”

In 2010, the total IOT revenue in China is $30 Billion. It is expected to grow up to $100 Billion in 2015.

As multiple heterogeneous devices attempt to create area networks, one of the major challenges is the interoperability and comparability of their services. The traditional way to address interoperability is to define standards; however, there are many standards and specifications that are incompatible with each other. Song et al. proposed a Semantic Middleware for the Internet of Things for interoperability among heterogeneous devices in the context of the Internet of Things.

IoT-A, the European Lighthouse Integrated Project addressing the Internet-of-Things Architecture, proposes the creation of an architectural reference model together with the definition of an initial set of key building blocks. Together they are envisioned as crucial foundations for fostering a future Internet of Things. Using an experimental paradigm, IoT-A will combine top-down reasoning about architectural principles and design guidelines with simulation and prototyping to explore the technical consequences of architectural design choices.

According to OpenCPI Technical Summary,

“OpenCPI is an open source software (OSS) framework to simplify complexity and improve code portability of embedded/real-time systems. OpenCPI is a middleware solution that simplifies programming of heterogeneous processing environments consisting of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), general-purpose processors (GPP), digital signal processors (DSP), and a variety of interconnection technologies including high-speed switch fabrics.

Building on some of the concepts introduced by the U.S. Government’s Software communications Architecture (SCA) standard, as well as other component-based frameworks and standards, OpenCPI extends component-based architectures into FPGAs, DSPs and GPUs to decrease development costs and time to market through code portability, reuse, and ease of integration. OpenCPI is based on about 30 manyears of funding.

OpenCPI is targeted toward real-time signal processing for embedded, heterogeneous systems for communications, xxxINT (Signals, Communications, Electronics, etc. -Intelligence) and CIED (Counter Improvised Explosive Devices) in defense intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems.”

OpenCPI is about how high power data processors including FPGAs are incorporated and links. I believe it may be applied and will play an important role on the connection of multimedia things.