Open IoT platform launched by Samsung

Samsung has announced the launch of a platform for the Internet of Things, “ARTIK”, which it claims is completely open and serves the entire software and hardware requirements of IoT.

Samsung Electronics’ president and chief strategy officer, Young Sohn, described ARTIK as “the industry’s most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products.” Samsung claims it will enable developers to customise and deploy IoT-devices, as well as the services they deliver.

From a hardware perspective, ARTIK comes in three flavours, imaginatively titled ARTIK 1, 5 and 10 respectively. ARTIK 1 is the 144mm² embedded module designed for small form-factor IoT applications and utilises Bluetooth/BLE technology for low-powered short range communications. ARTIK 5, Samsung says, is intended for small-to-medium size devices, such as home hubs and drones, and comes with a 1GHz dual-core processor, flash memory and on-board DRAM.

ARTIK 10 meanwhile is the full-fat module with an eight-core processor, HD video encoding/processing, 2GB DRAM and 16GB flash, and a variety of short-range, low power communications tech inside, such as wifi, Bluetooth, ZigBee. Samsung reckons it’s ideal for media applications, Industrial IoT and home servers.

“Industry requirements for IoT devices vary in terms of battery life, computational horse power and form factor,” said Sohn. “With this family of ARTIK offerings, Samsung is directly addressing the needs of the widest range of customers, uses and applications. ARTIK allows developers to rapidly turn great ideas into market leading IoT products and applications.”

ARTIK also incorporates a number of software considerations to give it credibility as a holistic IoT platform, according to Samsung. Technical aspects of the platform include security and privacy, local storage and computational capabilities, low-power architecture, small form factor, and compatility with the major connectivity protocols. Finally, the platform comes with a software stack which is intended to allow developers to go directly with application framework, thus removing the need to build low-level software

Samsung launched the platform at IOT World, taking place in San Francisco this week.